Re: dash drops exported bash functions

[Joachim Breitner <mail@joachim-breitner.de>]

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Dear Eric,

Am Mittwoch, den 10.02.2016, 08:54 -0700 schrieb Eric Blake:
> On 02/10/2016 08:18 AM, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> > Dear dash developers,
> > 
> > a change in 0.5.8, very likely this one
> > http://git.kernel.org/cgit/utils/dash/dash.git/commit/?id=46d3c1a614f11f0d40a7e73376359618ff07abcd
> > broke the exporting of bash shell functions via the environment.
> 
> Not a bug. POSIX says that on shell startup, the behavior of any
> inherited environment variables that do not start with a proper shell
> name is undefined; and allows shells to scrub such items out of the
> environment on startup.  Just because bash does not scrub them (but
> instead treats them as shell function imports) does not mean dash has to
> behave the same.
> 
> That said, preserving any unusable environment variables unchanged,
> rather than scrubbing them, may be slightly nicer behavior, but I'm not
> sure it's worth the bloat to dash to do so.

I’m not versed in reading POSIX,, so I won’t argue with that (although
I could not find a reference), but let me point out 8.1
"8.1 Environment Variable Definition" of "The Open Group Base
Specifications Issue 7" says
    “Other characters may be permitted by an implementation;
    applications shall tolerate the presence of such names.”

But it is not a big deal now, as the application suffering from this
issue will likely have to work-around this (or fix this, depending on
the POV) anyways.


Greetings,
Joachim
-- 
Joachim “nomeata” Breitner
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