Subject: Re: bug#7362: dd strangeness

From: Eric Blake <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 11:12:17 -0700

On 03/01/2011 10:45 AM, Paul Eggert wrote:
>> Checking POSIXLY_CORRECT allows one to disable the warnings
> 
> Yes, but POSIXLY_CORRECT should be used only to make a program conform
> to POSIX when the default behavior does not conform.  It shouldn't
> be used for auxiliary purposes such as suppressing warnings.  If we
> want an option to suppress warnings, we should add one; but we
> shouldn't overload POSIXLY_CORRECT.

Agreed - POSIXLY_CORRECT is not the right knob to use, since we are
already asserting that the warnings don't violate POSIX (indeed, POSIX
states under stderr that "Diagnostic messages may also be written to
standard error.", line 83304 of POSIX 2008).  We already have
status=noxfer as a way to suppress one class of output; we could add
status=nowarn to suppress this new warning.

-- 
Eric Blake   [email-masked]    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org