Date: Tue, 27 Jul 1999 13:43:33 +0200 From: Sheldon Hearn <sheldonh@uunet.co.za> To: Tim Vanderhoek <vanderh@ecf.utoronto.ca> Cc: obrien@freebsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: newsyslog owner.group -> owner:group Message-ID: <4792.933075813@axl.noc.iafrica.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 27 Jul 1999 06:57:49 -0400." <19990727065749.B32516@mad>
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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.
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