[MPlayer-dev-eng] [RELEASE] Pre4: 24th/25th April

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2004 at 01:06:15PM +0300, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 12:13:04PM -0400, D Richard Felker III wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 05:59:28PM +0200, Anders Rune Jensen wrote:
> > > I'm not sure if this has been submitted before, but the syntax for
> > > specifying the amount of lines to list in head and tail has been changed
> > > in the latest version of coreutils. Gentoo uses the attached patch for
> > > their ebuild, it should be backwards compatible with older versions of
> > > coreutils also.
> > 
> > This has been sent before (actually committed once) and REJECTED! The
> > person who did it got a lot of cola too. FSF does not have the
> > authority to redefine unix. Many old unices do not support -n, and
> > both forms (-n 1 and -1) are supported in posix.
> 
> The latest revision of POSIX (IEEE Std 1003.1-2001, also ISO/IEC
> 9945:2003, also Single UNIX Specification version 3) supports only -n 1:
> 
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/tail.html
> 
> Just FYI.

Yes, very stupid... Why gratuitously break something that's used all
over the place in scripts, and that's NEEDED for portability?? I'm
curious how gnu autoconf handles this, if it uses head/tail...

Rich