Date: Tue, 31 Aug 1999 01:02:10 +0200 From: Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com> Cc: "Rodney W. Grimes" <freebsd@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net>, Mark Murray <mark@grondar.za>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.ORG, cvs-all@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: spending toolchain options (Re: cvs commit: src/bin/mkdir mkdir.1 mkdir.c) Message-ID: <19990831010210.A30447@cons.org> In-Reply-To: <3072.936051369@localhost>; from Jordan K. Hubbard on Mon, Aug 30, 1999 at 03:16:09PM -0700 References: <199908302112.OAA66970@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> <3072.936051369@localhost>
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> Let's *discuss* this for an additional 48 hours and then try to come > to a concensus decision on these changes. If we decide that -v isn't > worth all the freakin' contraversy then fine, it goes. What we need are decisions about some past rules of thumb: 0) How much effort such be done to spare option letters for possible later use? Reasons to spare them: - Some standard may come along and use an option we've already spent. - Misspelled commands don't do "other" things. If all UNIX derivates would start adding their own options, shell script with wrong assumptions woudn't fail with suntaxt errors, but run with wrong switches turned on. 1) Old rule of thumb: Don't add options to commandline tools that are easily substituted by standard (POSIX) bourne shell constructs. Example 1: date -n was supposed to suporess the newline. This is easily replaced by backquotes or $(), maybe within double quotes. Example 2: date -l was supposed to echo the date in the timezone the machine thinks it is in, no matter what $YZ is set two. Most useful for working on freefall over the atlantik, but replaceable by (unset TZ; date) Will this be turned into a "real" rule? 2) Do we want our users to learn the shell? Don't dismiss the question easily. In my opinion, we loose badly if usage of UNIX things drops too much. Overall, I don't like the -v stuff, and adding -v to mkdir(1) just to make sure every util has -v is something I'm strongly against. As Mike Smith pointed out, these are not intended for shell script usage (then sh -x would be the better way), but for interactive usage. I don't think this is a useful addition for beginners. Add them as aliases to .bashrc and every shellscript started with bash will bomb out. The code committed also had quality issues, as pointed out in my first mail and by others. Martin -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> http://www.cons.org/cracauer/ BSD User Group Hamburg, Germany http://www.bsdhh.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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