Submitted By: Greg Schafer <gschafer at zip dot com dot au>
Date: 2004-01-18
Initial Package Version: 5.0
Upstream Status: Latest beta release makes this a compile-time config option.
Origin: Idea borrowed from Debian.
Description: Override system POSIX2 version.

Glibc's newer than 2.3.2 define _POSIX2_VERSION as 200112L. Compiling Coreutils
on such a Glibc system causes some of the utilities (head, tail, sort etc) to
reject the traditional syntax of those utilities which, BTW, happens to be
embedded in literally millions of scripts everywhere. e.g. tail -1 results in:

tail: `-1' option is obsolete; use `-n 1'

Even without this patch the problem can of course be worked around by exporting
_POSIX2_VERSION=199209 into the environment. This patch addresses the issue at
the source and restores the traditional behaviour until all of the many affected
scripts and packages can be fixed. The new behaviour can still be had by
exporting _POSIX2_VERSION=200112 into the environment.

diff -Naur coreutils-5.0.orig/lib/posixver.c coreutils-5.0/lib/posixver.c
--- coreutils-5.0.orig/lib/posixver.c	2002-02-16 08:13:08.000000000 +0000
+++ coreutils-5.0/lib/posixver.c	2003-12-01 05:09:19.000000000 +0000
@@ -37,6 +37,11 @@
 # define _POSIX2_VERSION 0
 #endif
 
+/* Do what Debian does and override system POSIX2 version pending transition
+   discussions.  */
+#undef _POSIX2_VERSION
+#define _POSIX2_VERSION 199209L
+
 /* The POSIX version that utilities should conform to.  The default is
    specified by the system.  */