Re: Proposed release announcement for findutils-4.6.0 - request for comments

[Andreas Metzler]

On 2015-12-27 James Youngman <address@hidden> wrote:
[...]
> 1. Some backward-incompatible changes have been made to find:
>   - egrep regular expressions now work like GNU grep -E
>   - Minor changes to the way nanoseconds fields are printed
>   - find -perm +mode is now fully POSIX compliant (if you
>     want the old behaviour use -perm /mode).
[...]

Hello,

I think this is too weak.

find -perm +symbolic_mode stopped being very useful with findutils
4.2.25 because it conflicted with POSIX.

The big change in 4.5 is dropping support for -perm +numeric_mode,
which might or might not be invalid syntax in POSIX, but does not
conflict with POSIX. It does conflict with chmod's intepretation of
+numeric_mode, which afaict from https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?38474
seems to have been the real reason for dropping findutils' support.

- find -perm +numeric_mode is not supported anymore. This syntax is
  unspecified/unsupported by POSIX. The functionality continues to be
  available with -perm /numeric_mode. (#38474)

cu Andreas
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