Subject: bug#15157: bug#15127: grep not taking last conflicting option as choice?

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 18:08:48 -0600

On 08/22/2013 04:18 PM, Linda Walsh wrote:
> Isn't the point of software to give users the freedom
> to make their choices -- to help them do their job?  It's not to enforce
> a particular mind-think or dogma.

And the point of free software is that YOU are free to modify the
software to fit your needs, and share your modifications; not to rant
that you got something at no price while demanding that someone else fix
it to meet your whims.  Share patches, rather than rants, and you will
gain a lot more friends in the world of free software.  If you are
unable to write patches, but the problem still affects your situation,
you could consider the possibility of hiring someone to write the patch
on your behalf and on your timeline, rather than waiting on the
generosity of others.  People are less motivated to fix bugs that you
report if you chew them out.

More than 50% of your mail was ranting about the behavior of grep, which
we already established is NOT part of the coreutils package.  If you
want to change the behavior of grep, please take your complaints (or
better yet, patches) over there, rather than wasting the time of a list
that has no control over grep's future.

>>> Could 15127 also be re-opened as it was closed unilaterally in the
>>> presence of obvious bugs.  Thanks...
>>
>> These are not obvious bugs. 
> ---
>     Inconsistent treatment of options is still confusing to users
> and causes errors.

Since this is the bug tracker for coreutils, please demonstrate a simple
shell script (preferably that exists in a version control repository of
a public project, but not mandatory) where the behavior of an existing
coreutils' option handling causes an actual problem, and/or prove with
appropriate quotations that we are violating a constraint of a document
that we claim to conform to, rather than wasting time theorizing about
whether the corner-case option handling behavior is broken or done by
design.  A short demo speaks much louder than a multi-line prose.
Consistency may be nice, but when you carry on long discourses about
corner cases that no one uses in real life shell scripts, it's hard to
take you seriously.

Furthermore, just because we closed bug 15127 (grep) as not a bug in the
context of coreutils does not mean that we are unilaterally rejecting it
as a bug, rather that we don't need the paperwork to track something
that cannot be fixed in the context of coreutils.  So far, no one in
this thread has flat-out claimed that grep is not buggy (my own claim is
that it is not an obvious bug, but I did not rule out the possibility
that there might be a subtle bug, nor that behavior might be worth
changing - but champion that on the grep list, not here).  Nor has
anyone closed out 15157 (join) - as Pádraig mentioned, we are looking at
what could be done as an improvement in quality of implementation.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org