Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 10:42:03 -0400 From: Bakul Shah <bakul@torrentnet.com> To: joelh@gnu.org Cc: dchapes@ddm.on.ca, rminnich@Sarnoff.COM, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Improvemnet of ln(1). Message-ID: <199807111442.KAA19474@chai.torrentnet.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 11 Jul 1998 02:08:46 CDT." <199807110708.CAA10210@detlev.UUCP>
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> Bottom line: Warnings are good program design. Requiring extra work > to issue them-- particularly when they're most frequently required in > interactive use-- is not. For interactive use, alias ln to `ln -w' to warn you. If you change the default behavior of ln, you *will* break scripts. Unlike editors, ln is more likely to be used in scripts than interactively (well, it is so for most people). Bottom line: backward compatibility is a good program design. > One of my very favorite badges says, "Unix doesn't keep you from doing > stupid things because that would keep you from doing clever things." > That's still true. But I still like to know that I'm doing something > stupid, just in case I'm not particularly clever at the moment. Adding such band-aids and making them the default *does* make it harder to do clever things (such as write scripts). To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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