Re: compatability: heirloom-utils +.5, libarchive -1

[Isaac Dunham <idunham@lavabit.com>]

On Tue, 3 Jan 2012 18:38:08 +0100
Szabolcs Nagy <nsz@port70.net> wrote:
> i had to fix things in heirloom to be able to compile
> it with pcc+musl
> i did about the same hacks, but then i ran various tests
> and some of the more obscure tools failed so i figured
> heirloom is not that good quality, eg.:
> nl -b a -v 0
> (i would never use nl but it turns out the build
> script mess of dash does ..for whatever reason)
heirloom toolchest has about four "personalities":
1. SVRx (default?)
2. BSD
3. Single UNIX 3
4. SUS
(The latter two are variants of POSIX)
In general, the POSIX variants are about as close to precisely
standards-conformant as you can get; unfortunately, the plain old UNIX
versions are default. I note, though, that nl presumably ought to start
numbering at 0 when specified; instead, it starts at 1 (SU3/SUS
variants), skipping the line that would be numbered 0.  The old unix
version apparently didn't recognize -b.
But I figure it beats Busybox any day--and I'd rather not use GNU
bloat.

I'd rather use mksh/ksh93, but if you want a POSIX shell, the Bourne
shell beats dash on standards-conformance (after all, it *is* the
standard). mksh (when invoked as sh) is almost pure POSIX.

Isaac