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It seems they are arguing that setenv should not exist in the first place: the fact it exists suggests it can and should be used, and thus not be a footgun.
by necovek 3y ago
It seems they are arguing that setenv should not exist in the first place: the fact it exists suggests it can and should be used, and thus not be a footgun.
- orwin 3y ago> the fact it exists suggests it can and should be used I think most people argue about that. Just because it exists doesn't mean it should be used imho. I've used it exactly once, and that was a school exercise where I had to write a Posix shell (most of a posix shell actually), including built-ins. I do not see another use case tbh.
- jstimpfle 3y ago> can and should be used, and thus not be a footgun It can and should be used in the cases where it makes sense, with the restrictions that are documented. It's an API that is fundamentally not thread-safe, you can not use it "safely" (in the modern sense of using it after a lobotomy, in any way that the compiler allows) in a multi-threaded context. There are other such APIs, and if those APIs were removed it would hurt a lot of old software that is running perfectly fine.