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To: kientzle@acm.org
From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 18 Oct 2003 09:25:24 PDT."
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Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2003 19:18:51 +0200
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Subject: Re: cvs commit: src/share/man/man4 umass.4 
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In message <3F916974.5030502@acm.org>, Tim Kientzle writes:

>>><scratching head>  Okay, Poul-Henning, I give up.  You've shown
>>>that /sbin/sunlabel exists, and use that as proof that "bsdlabel"
>>>is the right way to label a Sun disk?
>> 
>> No, to show that disklabel isn't the right one on any platform.
>
>Okay, I clearly missed something, then.  I thought that
>the intent of the 'disklabel' name (which is linked to 'bsdlabel'
>on i386, pc98, and amd64) was to provide an easy handle for
>the default label program for the current platform.  Apparently,
>David thinks so, too.

I don't think it makes much sense to symlink wildly different
programs to the same name, in particularly not when that name
has serious historical luggage and is used in some number of
highly magic scripts.

I think disklabel should print a message to stderr, pointing people
to the likely choice of program and exit with an error code.

If somebody wants to write a program which can truly and transparently
handle all platforms paritioning needs, he is of course more than
welcome to do so, but unless the user interface matches the historical
use of disklabel, he should still call it something sensibly different
from "disklabel".

What David might think about this does not concern me much.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.