On 09/13/11 16:44, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> On 15:02 Tue 13 Sep     , Amadeusz Żołnowski wrote:
>> Excerpts from Joshua Kinard's message of 2011-09-13 14:26:02 +0200:
>>>> You don't need -n/-z with [[.
>>>>
>>>>   [[ $var ]] == [[ -n $var ]]
>>>>   [[ ! $var ]] == [[ -z $var ]]
>>>
>>> What about other comparisons, like -f, -e, or -d?
>>
>> Same as inside [, but no need of quotes inside [[.
>>
>>> Also, is this a bash4-only thing, or bash3 and/or bash2 as well?
>>
>> I'm not sure.
>>
>> OT: When I was going through recruitment process, dberkholz pointed to
>> me that I use things bash4-only. And again: why we need to stick to
>> ancient 3 version? I would understand pseudo POSIX compatibility, but
>> what is the benefit of bash3 compatibility while bash4 is stable
>> already?
> 
> It's because people want to pretend that it's possible for incredibly 
> outdated systems (those with bash-3 only) to be updated.

Actually it's worse - PMS enforces this, and the only clean way out is
to patch/fix/extend PMS to allow bash4 - but that breaks compatibility
in silly ways.

The proper way to handle that? I'm not sure, since we had a long fight
to get PMS to acknowledge bash 3.2 instead of 3.0 I'm mostly ignoring
PMS as it doesn't care about reality.
> 
> We're stuck in this limbo because "we" have apparently decided that just 
> waiting a year, as we used to do, isn't good enough anymore; but at the 
> same time, we don't have a better mechanism in place yet. So we're 
> waffling around, doing nothing.
> 
That's not quite correct for this case, but it shows that we need to
discuss destructive changes (in the sense that they are not
backwards-compatible etc.) to have any decent progress