Does sane have a technical definition in a unix / linux context?
I mean in situations such as this:
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
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The first definition I learned was in ‘stty sane‘. As in ‘not sick‘. – ott-- Feb 26 '13 at 22:36
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“is the way [whatever printed the message] expects” – HalosGhost Nov 10 '16 at 01:22
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The standard English definition:
(of an undertaking or manner) reasonable; sensible.
—New Oxford American Dictionary
The Webster's Third New International Dictionary has a bit more to say on the subject, from the synonym study (bolding added):
SANE, usually constrasted with insane, indicates mental soundness, rationality, and level-headedness without wild quirks or deep derangements.
In the context of a "sane build environment," the phrase "without wild quirks" is particularly applicable.
More mechanically, you could define "sane" in this context as: "Not violating the usual expectations for the build environment."
What those "usual expectations" are is an inherently subjective question, unless you have an agreed-upon standard to refer to.
In a shell scripting environment, you could say a "sane" scripting environment is one that has tools which comply with POSIX specifications. But I wouldn't use the word "sane" for this; I would just say a "standard shell environment" or a "POSIX-compliant system."
POSIX is the most widely used standard for UNIX/Linux environments, but to my knowledge it doesn't describe the build environment (i.e. C compilers, libraries, etc.) so it may not fit the context you are asking about.
If a package installation gave me the message,
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
I would simply understand it to mean, as a message from the developers:
Checking that all our assumptions about the environment are correct, so we can bail out now if they're not, rather than checking these same assumptions continually throughout the rest of our code.
