Coreutils POSIX changes not documented in release notes

[Paul W. Frields]

On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 14:07 -0500, Bill Rugolsky Jr. wrote:
> Just discovered this.
> 
> IMHO, this massive breakage needs to be documented (in allcaps) in the
> FC5 Release notes:
> 
> 
> % info coreutils Standards
> 
>    2.9 Standards conformance
>    =========================
> 
>    In a few cases, the GNU utilities' default behavior is incompatible
>    with the POSIX standard.  To suppress these incompatibilities, define
>    the `POSIXLY_CORRECT' environment variable.  Unless you are checking
>    for POSIX conformance, you probably do not need to define
>    `POSIXLY_CORRECT'.
> 
>       Newer versions of POSIX are occasionally incompatible with older
>    versions.  For example, older versions of POSIX required the command
>    `sort +1' to sort based on the second and succeeding fields in each
>    input line, but starting with POSIX 1003.1-2001 the same command is
>    required to sort the file named `+1', and you must instead use the
>    command `sort -k 2' to get the field-based sort.
> 
>       The GNU utilities normally conform to the version of POSIX that is
>    standard for your system.  To cause them to conform to a different
>    version of POSIX, define the `_POSIX2_VERSION' environment variable to
>    a value of the form YYYYMM specifying the year and month the standard
>    was adopted.  Two values are currently supported for `_POSIX2_VERSION':
>    `199209' stands for POSIX 1003.2-1992, and `200112' stands for POSIX
>    1003.1-2001.  For example, if you have a newer system but are running
>    software that assumes an older version of POSIX and uses `sort +1' or
>    `tail +10', you can work around any compatibility problems by setting
>    `_POSIX2_VERSION=199209' in your environment.
> 
> I don't see anything about it here:
> 
>    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs/Beats
> 
> I was all excited about upgrading some servers to FC5, and this stops
> that upgrade cold until every one of hundreds of locally written scripts,
> some two decades old, are audited and "fixed."
> 
> Ugh, sometimes POSIX is just ridiculous.

I don't see how this is release notes worthy at all.  My FC3 box has the
exact same text in its coreutils.  Is there anyone running something
older who could check theirs?

-- 
Paul W. Frields, RHCE                          http://paul.frields.org/
  gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233  5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
 Fedora Documentation Project: http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/docs/
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