Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 10:45:31 -0500 (CDT) From: Joel Ray Holveck <joelh@gnu.org> To: bakul@torrentnet.com Cc: dchapes@ddm.on.ca, rminnich@Sarnoff.COM, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Improvemnet of ln(1). Message-ID: <199807111545.KAA13645@detlev.UUCP> In-Reply-To: <199807111442.KAA19474@chai.torrentnet.com> (message from Bakul Shah on Sat, 11 Jul 1998 10:42:03 -0400) References: <199807111442.KAA19474@chai.torrentnet.com>
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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. How on earth will issuing a diagnostic break scripts? >> 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). How on earth will issuing a diagnostic make it harder to write scripts? I have no descire whatsoever to break existing scripts, and I especially have no desire to break scripts written to go between several Unixes. But I don't see how adding a diagnostic will break anything. There seems to be a perception that I am proposing (actually, I believe rminnich proposed; I'm just arguing for) changing the practical behavior of ln. That would be a considerable lose. The only behavior I am proposing changing is what is output to stderr. I'm *not* talking about a prompt a la cp -i. I'm *not* talking about a failure a la trying to symlink over an existing file. I'm talking about a diagnostic. >From my first post: > # cd /usr > # ln -s src/sys /sys > ln: warning: src/sys does not exist relative to /. > # rm /sys > # ln -s usr/src/sys /sys Note that ln made the symlink anyway, without asking for confirmation. Happy hacking, joelh -- Joel Ray Holveck - joelh@gnu.org - http://www.wp.com/piquan Fourth law of programming: Anything that can go wrong wi sendmail: segmentation violation - core dumped To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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