Re: Afew words about POSIX and mkisofs
To Joerg :
I cannot see any practical benefit from changing the meaning of option -L.
As the author of cdrtools you are entitled to do such a change.
It is not a friendly gesture towards your programming users, nevertheless.
To Bill :
The option -allow-leading-dots is documented in the mkisofs -help text.
In mkisofs 2.01a34 :
-L, -allow-leading-dots OLD Pre-POSIX.1-2001 option - don't use -L
In mkisofs 1.12 (of 1998 or so) :
-L, -allow-leading-dots Allow iso9660 filenames to start with '.'
-allow-leading-dots is documented only in most recent versions of man mkisofs.
It does work with my whole collection of mkisofs versions, though.
I changed my code to use -allow-leading-dots and got no complaints from my
users, yet.
To POSIX :
Guys, you got a gigantomania problem.
Didn't you learn anything from the flop with command "tail" ?
The old style like "tail -1" has been obsoleted by POSIX a decade ago.
There are versions around which threaten to enforce the change to "tail -n 1".
They only print error messages but do not dare to refuse work. (Small minds.)
Obsoletion is in POSIX 1003.2-1992, denial of legality in POSIX 1003.1-2001.
But in nearly all printed books about shell programming i still read "tail -1".
German Linux Magazin recently distributed a booklet derived from O'Reilly's
Linux Pocket Guide, printed 2004. Just for curiosity i looked at the
description of "tail". There is still the old style described as valid.
I hate that.
Whatever, i will not fight the war for stability on the back of my users.
I bothered to simulate a tail that is POSIX compliant (since there is none
yet) and changed my scripts so that they will work with that legal cripple
if it really emerges.
The annoying messages of the wannabe cripples are displayed to the user,
though, and i encourage anybody who suffers from them to complain towards
the originator of that version of "tail".
So if you want to be laughed at, change your user interface to POSIX.
(Or just read the POSIX guidelines and ask yourself wether there aren't other
problems in the IT world which might be more important to deal with.)
One could ask for the origin of that POSIX arrogance. Well it is possibly due
to the overwhelmingly successful impact of POSIX on IT.
Like they did save us from the Unix wars and they saved us from MS-Windows
and they take an effective stand against SCO and they forced Linux Glib
programmers to stay compatible with their own work ...
... well, these tasks were all too hard and dangerous for gallant POSIX.
But cutting off the tail of an old little command, that's what their courage
was large enough. (Next they'll bloat frogs by a straw.)
Whew, that inner pressure had to be realeased. I feel better now.
Have a nice day :)
Thomas
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