Re: Afew words about POSIX and mkisofs
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> wrote:
> >This is of course complete nonsense, sorry :-(
> >
> >
>
> Does that mean you claim that all the scripts and programs which
> currently use the -L and -f options would continue to work exactly as
> they do now? Or that in some way not working as intended isn't the same
> as breaking in your mind.
Please read the man page, this helps to prevent a lot of people from wasting
time.
The -f option of mkisofs did never work as documented. A warning about this
fact has been added to mkisofs for release 2.0 (we now have 2.01) two years ago.
The option -L has been obsoleted and the fact has been announced on this list
some months ago. If you care about it and don't like the change that tries to
make mkisofs compliant to general POSIX rules, why didn't you complain at this
time?
> >There _definitely_ _is_ a compatible subset in old and new mkisofs versions.
> >Just read the man page before writing such mail....
> >
> >
>
> I have read the old man page, since I don't have the new one only you
> would say I should read it. I see no option I can use in place of -f or
> -L which works now and will work identically in the future versions.
> Please point out the compatible commands I can use for these operations.
Well, if you don't like to read the man page first you are uninformed and
like to stay uninformed. How could I discuss things with you as long as you
don't know the facts?
> >What I do is much better: a smoth planned transition that gives anybody a
> >long time to accomodate and allows even (although there is no need to do this)
> >to write shell scripts that work with very old, current and future mkisofs
> >versions.
> >
> >
>
> The transition is not in any way smooth! One version does one thing, one
The transisition is _very_ smooth. The only reason I see why you believe untrue
things is that you are uninformed because you neither read the man page nor
did call mkisofs -help.
If you care about interface stability, I encourage you to try to talk to the
Linux Kernel authors and explain them why they constantly break interfaces and
cause big trouble to other people. You could do a favor to _many_ Linux users
if you succeed with a Linux kernel stability talk....
> does another, there is no option (unless you care to point it out) which
> works now and will work in the future.
RTFM RTFM RTFM RTFM RTFM RTFM and _please_ don't reply again before you did.
Your untrue claims are a result of the fact that you did not yet read the man
page and did not call mkisofs -help.
> You have complained a lot about people creating incompatible versions of
> your software and not giving them a new name. Have you asked the author
> of mkisofs, Eric Youngdale, how he feels about your changes? Or do you
> feel that because you touched it most recently you have the right to
> mess it up?
It seems that you are comfused and completely miss the facts:
- Eric Youngdale did start working on mkisofs in 1993. The first release
is from October 1993 (Okt 29 1993 mkisofs-0.99.tar.gz)
- I did start to contribute work to mkisofs around summer 1996
with mkisofs-1.05
- The most recent mkisofs versions have been included with cdrecord-1.03
sice around January 1997.
- Eric did almost stop working on mkisofs in spring 1998. We did
agree to move the official maintainorship to me in August 1998.
He agreed that since August 15th 1998, I am the official maintainer.
I asked him if he could send the version crontrol files and he
agreed om that but has been too busy to do this soo.
- Starting in August 1998, I did stop working on cdrecord for 6 months
in order to fix the most important bugs in mkisofs.
- The final and official hand over of the CVS version control files
from Eric to me was in March 1999. I converted all CVS version
information and deltas into SCCS at that time.
Eric did never even send any comment on mkisofs since then.
As you see, Eric did work on mkisofs between October 1993 and ~ May 1998.
This 4.5 years.
I am working on mkisofs since summer 1996 (7 years). I am the official
maintainer of mkisofs since August 1998 which makes me the offical
mkisofs maintainer of the past 6 years.
Mkisofs sources did increase in size by a factor of 3 since I become the
maintainer. More than 80% of the old code has been changed since then.
For better understanding the facts, look at:
ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/mkisofs/old/
and in special have a look at:
ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/mkisofs/old/attic
> You reject this idea because you didn't think of it yourself, hopefully
> responsible vendors will continue to release versions which continue to
> work with all the software currently calling mkisofs.
Well I _did_ think about the problem but it seems that you would still need to
think before it makes sense to have a discussion on this topic.
If you believe that a planned smooth transition time of more than 2 years is
not sufficient why then do you still use Linux?
Jörg
--
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js@cs.tu-berlin.de (uni) If you don't have iso-8859-1
schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) chars I am J"org Schilling
URL: http://www.fokus.fraunhofer.de/usr/schilling ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
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