Subject: bug#16282: revisit; reasoning for not using ENV vars to provide workarounds for POSIX limitations?

From: Assaf Gordon <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2019 23:16:12 -0700

severity 16282 wishlist
tags 16282 wontfix
close 16282
stop

(triaging old bugs)

Hello,

On 2013-12-28 1:03 p.m., Paul Eggert wrote:
> [...] if it makes a standard
> utility behave in odd ways, it'll break scripts that
> don't expect the odd behavior.  That's the essential
> objection here.
> 
> Yes, we've used env vars in the past for this, but we've
> come to regret it, and we don't want to make matters worse
> in this respect without a compelling justification.

Given the above, and with no further comments in 5 years,
I'm closing this bug.

More details about the reasoning for rejecting new environment variables
are summarized here:
   https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/rejected_requests.html#envvar

regards,
  - assaf