>I'm definitely not in favor of fossilizing Unix, but there's a difference between avoiding fossilization and the kind of minimal, mathematical purity that we see GNU Grep trying to impose here.
I can't really see the difference. Adding a deprecation warning to stderr in a non-POSIX command 15 years after deprecation notice is among the smallest possible changes to [GNU's Not] Unix I can think of. Even then, the change is trivially silenced by deleting a single line in a shell script or two[1] and seems that some distros already do that for you[2].
Yes, this will break something for someone[3] and I might well be that someone. You truly have my sympathies. But if you want to run a system for a decade and a half without ever needing changes, stick to POSIX. You can't have your fossils and eat them too.
> But if you want to run a system for a decade and a half without ever needing changes, stick to POSIX. You can't have your fossils and eat them too.
… and test before making major system upgrades. For most users this won't be arriving until the next major distribution release and it seems unlikely that this will be the only visible change in such a move. If it's that big a deal, you should have a test environment, change management, dedicated admins, etc.
I can't really see the difference. Adding a deprecation warning to stderr in a non-POSIX command 15 years after deprecation notice is among the smallest possible changes to [GNU's Not] Unix I can think of. Even then, the change is trivially silenced by deleting a single line in a shell script or two[1] and seems that some distros already do that for you[2].
Yes, this will break something for someone[3] and I might well be that someone. You truly have my sympathies. But if you want to run a system for a decade and a half without ever needing changes, stick to POSIX. You can't have your fossils and eat them too.
[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/grep.git/commit/src/egrep.... [2] https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/39340 [3] https://xkcd.com/1172/