getopt(1) doesn't/can't preserve quoted args

[Doug Gwyn]

In a paper entitled "An Enhanced Getopt", T. C. Jones and L. A. Kennedy
of AT&T Bell Laboratories undertook an overhaul of getopt(1) and getopt(3C)
to support the Command Syntax Standard.  They proposed altering the usage
of getopt(1) from the current
	set -- `getopt ops $*`
to
	eval set -- "`getopt ops "$@"`"
in order to avoid the extra IFS argument splitting.  In order for this
proposal to work, a shell bug (handing of $@ when no arguments exist)
needs to be fixed.

Their proposal has one serious design botch, however:  The new form of
getopt(1) cannot be upward-compatible with the current version!  This
should be avoided by calling the new utility something like "getopts"
while continuing to provide a "getopt" with the old semantics during a
transition period.  I hope this mistake is fixed before we all end up
having our existing shell scripts break on "flag day".