Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1998 17:45:53 -0500 (CDT) From: Joel Ray Holveck <joelh@gnu.org> To: hamilton@pobox.com Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Improvemnet of ln(1). Message-ID: <199807122245.RAA02880@detlev.UUCP> In-Reply-To: <199807122104.OAA12805@hub.freebsd.org> (message from Jon Hamilton on Sun, 12 Jul 1998 15:40:08 -0500) References: <199807122104.OAA12805@hub.freebsd.org>
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>> I trust Unix to do what I tell it to. But I don't mind it reminding >> me if I may have had one too many as it's doing what I told it to. > Ok, but your sample size of one isn't much of a consensus. I didn't come up with the idea. I've got a sample size of at least twice what you thought, so there! :-) If I was sure that this was the Right Thing, I wouldn't have put it to the mailing lists. I'd have just submitted a patch. Instead, I thought I'd see just what the sample size is. (And so far, although there's a lot of people scared that something will break, I have yet to buy any beers... but I've got a message in my inbox that may make me eat my words.) > This is clearly a religious argument, And boy, do I wish I had known that when I started. > and your religion seems to operate from the premise that people > should be protected from themselves. While that's not what you're > explicitly proposing in this case, I think that *is* the kind of > philosophy that underpins your suggestion, and I suspect that's what > some people are objecting to - once we do this, what's the next > "little step" we undertake to protect J. Random Luser? No, my religion includes reminding users of common mistakes that result in valid commands-- in this case, forgetting that ln and ln -s have a different syntax. I had thought that this was a common error. However, it seems that there are remarkably few of us. I object to preventing a user from doing anything at all, from making a symbolic link to a non-existant file, to more catastrophic possibilities like unlinking directories and newfs'ing a mounted fs. >> It comes back to my earlier question: Are there going to be more >> lossages if we add the warnings, or if we don't? I know for a fact >> that I've done the same thing that rminnich described in his original >> post. I also know that I've never written a script that this change >> would break. > Well, from a slightly different perspective, you're arguing for a > change. As I said before, if you don't want any changes... this seems to be a tricky bit for a lot of people here... *you can't upgrade your OS!* > If things are left as they currently stand, there is no POLA factor to > consider. Not for existing Unix users. I would consider having -s change the syntax of ln to be a POLA violation, but it's embedded enough that I wouldn't dare change that. Happy hacking, joelh -- Joel Ray Holveck - joelh@gnu.org - http://www.wp.com/piquan Fourth law of programming: Anything that can go wrong wi sendmail: segmentation violation - core dumped To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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