Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:13:37 -0400 From: Garance A Drosehn <gad@FreeBSD.org> To: Doug Barton <dougb@FreeBSD.org>, Brian Somers <brian@FreeBSD.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.org, Ivan Radovanovic <rivanr@gmail.com> Subject: Re: Deprecating ps(1)s -w switch Message-ID: <p06240809c6ba655315f5@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <4A94325D.6070201@FreeBSD.org> References: <20090825034054.2d57e733@dev.lan.Awfulhak.org> <4A94325D.6070201@FreeBSD.org>
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At 11:50 AM -0700 8/25/09, Doug Barton wrote: >Brian Somers wrote: >> I recently closed bin/137647 and had second thoughts after Ivan (the >> originator) challenged my reason for closing it. >> >> The suggestion is that ps's -w switch is a strange artifact that can >> be safely deprecated. ps goes to great lengths to implement width >> limitations, and any time I've seen people not using -ww has either >> been a mistake or doesn't matter. Using 'cut -c1-N' is also a great >> way of limiting widths if people really want that... >> >> I'd like to propose changing ps so that width limits are removed and >> '-w' is deprecated - ignored for now with a note in the man page >> saying that it will be removed in a future release. >> >> Does anyone have any objections to doing this? I don't propose >> merging this back into stable/8. > >Short version, yes, I object to changing the defaults. Speaking as someone who has worked on 'ps' in the past, I recommend that you go slow in making arbitrary changes. 'ps' is already a minefield of craziness between various versions of unix, and adding this new variant will just make matters worse. You certainly can not go back to older releases and change the formatting there, so all programmers who write for a variety of machines/platforms will just end up with one extra way for things to break. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = drosehn@rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@FreeBSD.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy, NY; USA
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