Re: declare -x non-exportable variable types

[Chet Ramey]

On 2/25/22 12:55 PM, Léa Gris wrote:
> Le 25/02/2022 à 16:49, Chet Ramey écrivait :
>
> > You can't export array variables, period. You can't export attributes, 
> > only variable names and values. You still can't export attributes. There 
> > is no way to export attributes
>
> Chet, I heard you, I understood it and I knew it before, while I was 
> writing my message, and still now.
>
> It feels like that you were either in a bad mood or that I didn't manage to 
> express my remarks and thoughts as clearly as I would have liked.

OK. I don't think my response was especially tense (now, terse, maybe). I
simply disagree with much of your premise.

> Now that you and I are, were and still are (I reassure you) in absolute 
> agreement with: "Bash variable attributes and, or arrays are incompatible 
> with environment variables" (undisputed fact)...

Variables have names, values, and attributes. Environment variables don't
have enough information to contain all three (or two, in the case of
arrays, without some special encoding).


> Is it possible that: if these variables are passed explicitly as 
> environment variables with -x or export :
>
> - Either Bash returns an error because of "variable flags are incompatible 
> with the environment, and it's a mistake to export Bash variables with 
> flags", rather than having different behaviours (pass value, nothing, 
> name...) based on the original Bash variable flags/type?

But you have not shown such `different behaviors'. In the case of array
variables, not exporting them is a conscious choice based on the issues
encoding the values, and that is documented. Is that what you mean?

> - Or that Bash should now be able to "convert" the value as it does now, 
> but in a more consistent way?

I simply don't see the inconsistency you claim is there. Bash exports names
and values for variables to which you assign the export attribute.

> - Or that the documentation contains an explicit description of what 
> happens when one tries to export a Bash variable with flags/types (even 
> just documented as: "The result of exporting Bash variables with attributes 
> is indeterminate"), which might be an appropriate clarification?

OK, what's indeterminate about it? I showed how the behavior from your
first message was all consistent.

--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://tiswww.cwru.edu/~chet/