Mail Archives: djgpp-workers/1999/01/10/06:34:08
On Fri, 8 Jan 1999, Mark E. wrote:
> Seeing that the latest official DJGPP version of shell utilities is 1.12
> and the latest version is 1.16, I thought I'd give porting 1.16 a try using
> the patches in 1.12 as a start and make the port available.
A good idea. Please go ahead.
> One thing I
> want to do is make "test -f" find executables like "test -x" does since
> autoconf and the configure scripts like to use "test -f".
Let's keep things in perspective here, shall we? "test -f" is not
used in configure scripts alone. Somebody might actually want to use
it to look for files. If and when they do, I'm not sure they would
like "test -f foo" mysteriously succeed when there's no file `foo'
anywhere in sight, but there is `foo.bat', say.
Moreover, what you suggest would leave a user no easy escape from this
situation, even if they somehow understand why is this happening,
unless you now introduce a new option "test -f --no-x", which disables
this ``feature''.
Besides, in most cases this change won't help you a bit with configure
scripts, since `test' is built into Bash, and so Bash itself will
never use the external version.
It is also my firm belief that this problem should not be solved on
the level of `test'. `test' is too low-level to solve such
context-dependent problems. You risk getting users into more trouble
than you solve.
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