
Mac OS X isn't POSIX compliant - geocar
http://www.weirdnet.nl/apple/rename.html
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wmf
I agree that this bug is worth fixing, but I don't think appealing to POSIX
authority is a good idea. As we saw in the ext4 fsync debacle, what matters is
expected behavior. POSIX (and its cousin UNIX®) doesn't matter.

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DarkShikari
That was a case of "expected behavior" being a superset of POSIX, not a
subset. POSIX's guarantee wasn't sufficient.

This is a case where the behavior _does not even live up to POSIX's guarantee_
, so I wouldn't say that it's comparable at all.

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nailer
I'd say the main issue is that it doesn't match the documentation.

POSIX is severely out of date, and must be broken to do even simple things
like handle filenames with spaces in them from a shell script.

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geocar
Link to the relevant portion of POSIX (IEEE 1003.1):

[http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/rena...](http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/rename.html)

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sambeau
This post should be titled "Mac OS X has a bug in it".

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jleyank
Isn't this part of the Darwin portion of OSX, which is available? Has anybody
checked the appropriate code to see how it differs from BSD/Linux?

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djcapelis
This matters as this is one of the things a lot of carefully coded
applications need to work or the rest falls down like a house of cards.

~~~
demallien
Of course the counter point is that OS X passes the POSIX compliance tests, so
this is apparently _not_ considered to be a big deal.

But instead of us debating hypotheticals, perhaps you could list some of the
"a lot of carefully coded applications" that break without this. Facts are
always preferable to hyperbole.

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geocar
Some programs that depend (specifically) on this behavior I'm aware of: qmail,
postfix, dovecot

These programs derive their purported reliability from these rename()
semantics.

By the way, _Windows_ passed the POSIX conformance tests, but only a salesman
thinks this means that Windows is POSIX compliant.

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j_baker
Actually, I would believe that and I'm not a salesman:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_Services_for_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_Services_for_UNIX)

Microsoft actually has a UNIX emulation layer for Windows.

~~~
geocar
Windows was listed as POSIX-compatible (passing the POSIX conformance test
suite) as early as Windows NT 3.51, and perhaps earlier.

I was not referring to add-ons that can make Windows more POSIXish, but
Windows itself.

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gscott
It's Bug ID 5,799,661 so they have a few to work through before getting to
that one.

~~~
jvdh
Actually, it's marked as duplicate of 5,398,777, so it jumped the queue ;)

