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This is so unfortunate about these ubiquitous tools. At a certain point we seem to have stopped adding tools to POSIX. Does anyone know why exactly?

• wahern 1y ago
  To be added to POSIX usually requires common existing availability of a feature, if not literally at least substantially similar and not too difficult to add a POSIX-compliant mode. Fortunately this has become easier to achieve now that most of the more esoteric Unix-like systems have died off. POSIX-2024 added at least three new utilities: readlink, realpath, and timeout.[1] (It also added the gettext localization framework, which includes new C APIs and a few additional shell utilities.) Many utilities gained new flags and features, including Make. For example, POSIX Make now supports "!=" variable assignment for capturing shell command invocations, as well as guaranteed computed macro name evaluation (i.e. `$($(FOO).$(BAR))`). The latter actual gives a standards compliant way to implement conditionals, and interestingly had already been supported on all common Make implementations for a very long time. These days anybody can meaningfully participate in POSIX. You can get started by checking out https://austingroupbugs.net/ https://austingroupbugs.net/, where both errata and suggestions for new features can be added. There's also a mailing-list you can join, though most of the discourse happens in the ticket tracker. But please don't spam new feature requests, a la GitHub drive-bys. Spend a good amount of time understanding the specification and existing review processes, e.g. by reading alot of ticket discussions. [1] See https://sortix.org/blog/posix-2024/ https://sortix.org/blog/posix-2024/