Re: Afew words about POSIX and mkisofs
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> wrote:
Bill, discussions would be much easier if you did read the man page for mkisofs
or look at the mkisofs -help output.
> A few things occur to me about the idea of changing the meaning of -L in
> mkisofs:
> 1 - mkisofs is not part of the SuS
This is not relevant as this my change and there is a set of rules
that should be followed.
> 2 - there are many existing exceptions, the most common being the
> meaning of -L in cc
But mkisofs is not cc. Mkisofs is one of the typical applications that
is in the group of commands that deal with symbolic links.
mkisofs is in the group of commands like ls, chmod, pax and pax is very close
in to mkisofs in it's destination and behavior.
> 3 - this change would break scripts and programs which generate calls to
> mkisofs, potentially thousands of uses. Worse yet, there will be no
> compatible subset of commands which does the right thing on "old" and
> "new" implementations.
This is of course complete nonsense, sorry :-(
There is a big difference between what I do and what the hazardeurs from
the Linux kernel do:
I plan things I do and I allow other people to know about the future behavior
of my programs in advance.
There _definitely_ _is_ a compatible subset in old and new mkisofs versions.
Just read the man page before writing such mail....
In addition: people who now use the outdated options get a warning.
Depending on the time that will pass until mkisofs 2.02 will be published,
there may even be a time frame when mkisofs will abort with an error message.
> 4 - Joerg is already unhappy about getting complaints about forked
> versions which ship with many distributions, this is bound to generate
> more as things break. And it will probably generate yet more forks.
>
> Suggestion: keep the old command set as default and provide an option to
> switch to POSIX compliant behavior if anyone but Joerg cares to use it.
This is a real bad idea and does not help anybody.
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.
Jörg
--
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) chars I am J"org Schilling
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