From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Jul 27 4:44:31 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from axl.noc.iafrica.com (axl.noc.iafrica.com [196.31.1.175]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1DF7914D71; Tue, 27 Jul 1999 04:43:55 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sheldonh@axl.noc.iafrica.com) Received: from sheldonh (helo=axl.noc.iafrica.com) by axl.noc.iafrica.com with local-esmtp (Exim 3.02 #1) id 1195dt-0001FJ-00; Tue, 27 Jul 1999 13:43:33 +0200 From: Sheldon Hearn To: Tim Vanderhoek Cc: obrien@freebsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: newsyslog owner.group -> owner:group In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 27 Jul 1999 06:57:49 -0400." <19990727065749.B32516@mad> Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 13:43:33 +0200 Message-ID: <4792.933075813@axl.noc.iafrica.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 27 Jul 1999 06:57:49 -0400, Tim Vanderhoek wrote: > Consider also adding owner:group support to -stable in order to > provide the longest change-over period possible. You have to read the CURRENT newsyslog(8) manpage before you realize that this is a lose-lose situation: COMPATIBILITY Previous versions of the chown utility used the dot (``.'') character to distinguish the group name. Begining with FreeBSD 4.0, this has been changed to be a colon (``:'') character so that user and group names may contain the dot character. If we don't offer backward compatibility, people will whine when they stub their toes. If we do, we break support for usernames which contain the dot (``.'') . I think David's chosen the lesser of two evils and I support his decision. However, I think we could at least introduce consistency with chown(8) by making dot-as-token support a compile-time option, -DSUPPORT_DOT which is turned _on_ by default. Later, -DSUPPORT_DOT can be removed from the Makefiles for chown(8) and newsyslog(8) and documented in src/Makefile.inc1 . Sorry for bringing this up without doing all my homework. Diffs in the pipeline. :-) Ciao, Sheldon. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message