KDE refuses to start, part 2

[jabr at abreau.net (John Abreau)]

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Greg Galperin <grg22 at ai.mit.edu> writes:

> Trying to bring some focus, you think that it's reasonable for scripts
> to assume that the user didn't customize noclobber, one of the twenty
> (give or take, depending on your shell version) bash "shell options."
> I disagree.  Those twenty shell options are there explicitly so the
> users can customize them, and I believe it's a bad assumption and poor

First of all, bash is essentially a superset of the bourne shell, and 
is expected to run bourne shell scripts correctly. "noclobber" is not 
part of the bourne shell, and scripts written for that over the past 
30+ years shouldn't have to be rewritten to account for this. 

Second, your argument applies to any other baby-proofing options that 
might be added to bash in the future. I don't agree with the argument 
that a script I wrote in 1985 is badly coded merely because it fails to 
explicitly check for an environment variable that will be added to bash 
in 2005. 


- --
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
Email jabr at blu.org / WWW http://www.abreau.net / PGP-Key-ID 0xD5C7B5D9
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