Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2002 23:07:26 -0800 From: Doug Barton <DougB@DougBarton.net> To: Mike Barcroft <mike@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org, joe@freebsd.org Subject: Re: LSCOLORS warning is silly Message-ID: <3C79E2AE.AFCA54F0@DougBarton.net> References: <3C79CD3B.E315DF4B@DougBarton.net> <20020225005343.C31007@espresso.q9media.com>
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Mike Barcroft wrote:
>
> Doug Barton <DougB@DougBarton.net> writes:
> > A couple months ago an improvement was added to the color support of ls
> > to use a wider variety of colors, indicated by alphabet characters
> > instead of numbers. While I think this is a good change, it included a
> > warning when users have the old style numeric flags in their LSCOLORS
> > variable. I think this is a mistake, and needlessly places another
> > barrier for users coming into -current. Since the support for the old
> > style color flags is practically free, I'd like to suggest that rather
> > than warning the user, we simply continue to support the old flags, and
> > indicate that they are deprecated in the man page.
>
> Deprecated features should generate warnings.
Ok, then let's call it "Undocumented legacy support." I agree that
features we don't want to support anymore should generate warnings that
encourage users to change. However, there is so little cost to support
the old flags that there is no reason to ever discontinue that support.
it's two lines of code. You can see them in the diff. The code is even
properly documented to indicate it's purpose. It can't get any better
than that.
Let me restate the more important point... there are already 843 things
that need to be changed/updated/dealt with in moving from 4.x to 5.0.
Most of them are even necessary. If we want to encourage users to adopt
5.0 (at whatever phase of the game) we should not place silly barriers
in front of them. It took me over an hour today to track down broken
stuff that developed between my last -current update of 12/2/01 till
today. And I track development better than most of the people who will
use the first 5.0 snapshot. This is one more annoyance I don't need, and
I think most of our userbase will feel the same way. If this were an
expensive thing to support, I would have stuck with the man page update
only. But it's not.
Doug
--
"We have known freedom's price. We have shown freedom's power.
And in this great conflict, ... we will see freedom's victory."
- George W. Bush, President of the United States
State of the Union, January 28, 2002
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