Re: sed patch for POSIX conformance with /[]/

[Paul Eggert]

"address@hidden" <address@hidden> writes:

> I was specifically asked by users to make POSIXLY_CORRECT sed not
> introduce most GNU extension (e.g. the one you cite).

OK, but that's not what POSIXLY_CORRECT is for.  The GNU coding
standards <http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards_8.html> say that
POSIXLY_CORRECT is for suppressing extensions that conflict with
POSIX.  The GNU sed extensions in question don't conflict with POSIX,
so they shouldn't be suppressed by POSIXLY_CORRECT.

Do you have a URL for that user request?  Perhaps there's another way
to implement it.  For example, if there's a need to disable all GNU
sed extensions to POSIX, this could be done by adding a --posix-only
option, or perhaps a POSIX_ONLY environment variable.  This would be
useful for producing scripts that port to other POSIX systems.

I don't know of any precedent for this in other GNU utilities, but
I'll CC: this to bug-gnu-utils to see if anyone else has a comment on
the environment variable or option name.