Subject: bug#51311: [PATCH] echo: update --help to document edge cases

From: Florent Flament <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2021 15:14:08 +0200

Pádraig Brady <[email-masked]> writes:

> BTW the env var is POSIXLY_CORRECT, not STRICTLY_POSIX.

Nice catch !

> Anyway I don't think we should mention that in the man page anyway.
> I'll push the attached later, which just says printf(1) is preferred.

I think the man page should warn users about possible bad usages of the
command. Just saying that 'printf' is preferred doesn't tell why,
therefore people won't use it IMHO.

> +  fputs (_("\n\
> +NOTE: printf(1) is a preferred alternative, with more standard option handling.\
> +\n\
> +"), stdout);

I believe that it misses the point. It is still not clear that the echo
command doesn't behave as one would expect for a few edge cases.

Maybe something like this would be closer to what I'm trying to express:

NOTE: printf(1) is a preferred alternative, which doesn't share echo's
inability to handle edge cases.

Regards,
Florent