Proposal: set -o pipefail

[Stephen Oberholtzer <stevie@xxxxxxxxx>]

(NOTE: not subscribed to list, so be sure to CC me)

I did my first foray into shell scripting for task automation on
Debian earlier this week, and one of the things I discovered is that
'pipefail' is apparently not available from dash, which provides
Debian's /bin/sh.

When I looked at what I would need to write to work around this
limitation, I instead wrote a patch for Dash to add support for
pipefail. This took less time (and, arguably, required less code.)

However, when searching the mailing list archives for anything related
to such functionality, I discovered that "Only features designated by
POSIX, plus a few Berkeley extensions, are being incorporated into
this shell."

As a result, I have two questions:

(1) Would Dash be willing to support this extension? (I'll even call
myself Berkely if it'll make it happen.)

(2) If it absolutely, positively has to be available in POSIX, how can
I submit a proposal for the inclusion of 'pipefail' as an option?

--
Stephen Oberholtzer