Re: /bin/pwd

[Jan S. <ha...@st...>]

On Sep 02 02:04:26, dan...@gm... wrote:
> I'd like to come back to this (keeping changes only locally works, but
> until now I've found no better solution than to have a patch, apply it
> and always revert before making modifications, which is not nice.):
> 
> Jan Stary wrote:
> > You are suggesting to discard the standard, portable way of doing things
> > in order to accommodate one Frankenstein system.
> > Not that I have any say in this, but no way.
> 
> What's more portable: /bin/pwd (which does not work on my
> "Frankenstein system") or pwd (which works on my system, too)?

/bin/pwd, because it's the standrad, POSIX-defined tool.
Also, it's an absolute path, not dependent of PATH setting.

Portable means it runs on every standards-compliant system;
it seems that portability for you is "it works on my system".


> Or put differently: Is there any system that we know of where my
> change actually breaks something?

What kind of argument is that? The burden of proof that
your proposed deviation from the standard is good is on you.

It "breaks" on every system where "pwd" is not the POSIX-defined pwd(1)
- for example a shell builtin, implemented by a shell we don't know,
in a way we don't know. Or anywhere the user Prints White Dots (or whatever)
with an unrelated "pwd" binary in his PATH.

I'll repeat: if you want to know the name of the current directory
in a script, why would you call anything else than /bin/pwd [-L-P]?
Please give a better reason than "my broken non-UNIX system doesn't
even have /bin/pwd".

> As a side note:
> > How about you locally make a /bin/pwd symlink
> > and leave things like they should be?
> 
> This might work on my laptop, where I'm root and so on. But I might
> also want to push the build (nix allows for that in a very convenient
> way) to one random (low load) computer in my universities computer
> pool.

Again, you propose accommodating a broken system
as a reason to deviate from the standard. No way.
(Disclaimer: I don't have any say in this.)

The problem you have here is that your system doesn't have /bin/pwd,
not that clisp scripts call /bin/pwd.

> Another note: /bin/pwd will (does) break on a system with GNU Guix,
> too. Guix is the (only?) package manager under the GNU umbrella.

What does "packaging" or GNU have to do with this?