Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 15:40:45 -0700 From: Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org> To: Garrett Wollman <wollman@lcs.mit.edu> Cc: Bill Fenner <fenner@research.att.com>, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Who broke sort(1) ? Message-ID: <20020924224045.2F4B82A7D6@canning.wemm.org> In-Reply-To: <200209242202.g8OM25P1091340@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
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Garrett Wollman wrote:
> <<On Tue, 24 Sep 2002 14:09:31 -0700, Bill Fenner <fenner@research.att.com> s
aid:
>
> > When's the first time the FreeBSD sort(1) man page mentioned that this
> > syntax was deprecated? Can we at least start from there?
>
> It does not appear to have ever been properly documented.
>
> I don't object to maintaining backwards compatibility for a few more
> releases (even if the application writers are the ones at fault),
> since many more people read the manual pages than read the Standard.
> However, I would point out that this isn't the first time we broke a
> traditional syntax in favor of reducing restrictions on argument
> names: see the recent history of chown(8).
While this is true, consider that rev 1.1 of chown.8 says:
COMPATIBILITY
Previous versions of the chown utility used the dot (``.'') character to
distinguish the group name. This has been changed to be a colon (``:'')
character so that user and group names may contain the dot character.
revision 1.1
date: 1994/05/26 05:22:22; author: rgrimes; state: Exp;
It's also true that this was widely known and the transition was mostly
orderly. We didn't turn it off one night as a side effect of another
change that broke even our own world builds.
Cheers,
-Peter
--
Peter Wemm - peter@wemm.org; peter@FreeBSD.org; peter@yahoo-inc.com
"All of this is for nothing if we don't go to the stars" - JMS/B5
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