Documenting tools necessary for GCC [draft]

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Zack Weinberg wrote:

> Not good enough.  The POSIX shell and make specifications were not
> written with the aim of making it possible to write portable shell
> scripts or makefiles.  They were written with the aim of making it

POSIX make is fairly useless, but the POSIX shell specification
essentially documented ksh (which is what e.g. Solaris uses as
/usr/xpg4/bin/sh).  It is a usable environment for writing portable shell
scripts and far better to specify that than to attempt to support
derivatives of the original Bourne shell.  The POSIX specification of the
shell is also much clearer than most other documents that attempt to
explain the Unix shell.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk