Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 00:08:58 +1100 From: Andrew Reilly <areilly@bigpond.net.au> To: "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@tristatelogic.com> Cc: gnome@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: ports/140563: net/avahi-app doesn't build - depends on missing "gnome-config" Message-ID: <20100104000858.2ec828b7@duncan.reilly.home> In-Reply-To: <17006.1262490765@tristatelogic.com> References: <1262486170.16768.56.camel@shumai.marcuscom.com> <17006.1262490765@tristatelogic.com>
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On Sat, 02 Jan 2010 19:52:45 -0800 "Ronald F. Guilmette" <rfg@tristatelogic.com> wrote: > As I've said, I have built hundreds and hundreds of FreeBSD ports... over > a span of more than ten years. In all that time, I've only seen a grand > total of -two- (count 'em, two) instances of this kind of command invocation > faux pas... one of them being this new one in avahi-app. (The other one, > as I said, was in some port required by the nmh mail port... and that one > got fixed already, I think.) Just sticking an oar in edge-wise: I think that (despite certain Posix dictates still currently in effect) you'll find that precisely this kind of argument/switch re-ordering is quite common now, and (as near as I can see) is not going to go away. Consider that cvs, p4, openssl, geom, gmirror, (off the top of my head) also have command lines of the form program [global switches] command [command-switches] [command-arguments], where "command" is a non-switch, non-optional argument that describes the particular thing that you want "program" to do. I doubt very much that this kind of use is going to go away just because the IEEE Posix committee stamps their feet. It has always been the BSD way (in my experience) to follow Posix as well as possible, but not to the detriment of existing functionality. I'm happy with that stance. I expect that you'll have a long fight to get this trend to change, for multi-function command-line utilities. Cheers, -- Andrew
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