Subject: Re: bug#57604: [ef]grep usage -> POSIXLY_CORRECT?

From: Karl Berry <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2022 17:01:01 -0600

Hi Jim,

    Some must care about portability, 
    
Certainly agreed. Even I do, sometimes :). But that does not mean
everyone needs to, in every situation.  As I said, I fail to understand
the benefit of making the warning unconditional.

So far as I can see, it's also against GNU principles, as I wrote,
though evidently you don't agree.

    and these warnings help them do a better job.

When people want extreme POSIX compliance, they should set
POSIXLY_CORRECT. That's what it's there for, and that's when I think the
warnings should be issued, as I said at the beginning.

But since Paul rejected that, ok, a different variable that lets us turn
them off (GREPWARNINGS=efgrepok or whatever) would at least provide some
palliation. I don't understand why you two are opposed to this simple
remediation.

    As Gary mentioned above, it's easy to disable them.

Obviously it is trivial to edit the scripts or have a different version
in PATH for my own machine(s).  But those are no substitute for having a
supported way to use the distributed [ef]grep without warnings.

    I would argue that it is even more important to retain these
    stray-backslash warnings, because they tend to highlight real bugs.

"tend" being the key word there. But anyway, I see your point, and won't
argue that one further, since the efgrep warnings are what's causing me
the agony. -k