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Date:      Thu, 21 Nov 2002 12:27:29 -0800
From:      David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU>
To:        Tim Robbins <tjr@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@Leidinger.net>, Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Asking for tester (small patch to chown(8)/chgrp(1))
Message-ID:  <20021121202729.GA5473@HAL9000.homeunix.com>
In-Reply-To: <20021121152158.A56883@dilbert.robbins.dropbear.id.au>
References:  <200211161129.gAGBTKHJ033124@lurza.secnetix.de> <20021117155159.44aeae5f.Alexander@Leidinger.net> <200211181807.gAII7u0w015430@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <20021119182700.GA3030@HAL9000.homeunix.com> <20021120132743.5a46abbe.Alexander@Leidinger.net> <20021121152158.A56883@dilbert.robbins.dropbear.id.au>

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Thus spake Tim Robbins <tjr@FreeBSD.ORG>:
> On Wed, Nov 20, 2002 at 01:27:43PM +0100, Alexander Leidinger wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 19 Nov 2002 10:27:00 -0800
> > David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
> > 
> > > > > I'm concerned about the used character: "-r" is similiar to "-R"
> > > > 
> > > > Yes, `-r' would be a very poor choice for the reason you state.
> > > 
> > > Agreed, but the precedent has already been set by touch(1) and
> > > truncate(1).  If we're going to get it wrong some of the time, we
> > > might as well be consistent about it.
> > 
> > When we don't look at the fact that neither touch nor truncate operate
> > recursivly... what about changing touch and truncate to allow the
> > proposed -c (or -i) too and mark -r as deprecated (if it isn't covered
> > by a standard)?
> 
> I'd really rather that we didn't change this at all, even if it seems
> "inconsistent". Changing it would just lead to more confusion.
> 
> I am also against adding new options to chown to copy ownership from
> existing files.
> 
> Copy ownership:	chown `stat -f%Su file1` file2
> Copy group:	chgrp `stat -f%Sg file1` file2
> Copy both:	chown `stat -f%Su:%Sg file1` file2
> 
> These could easily be made into shell functions or whatever...

Admittedly it *is* creeping featurism, but there's already
creeping featurism all over the place if you're going to be that
strict about it.  You might as well reimplement ls(1) as a shell
script and remove 30 of its 33 documented options.  I think -r is
a specific case that happens to be useful and convenient for
chown.  Most of this discussion has been bogged down in the choice
of option name, which is really silly.

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