Alfred M. Szmidt (ams) contributed a patch to the GNU file utilities to cause 'ls --author -l' to output a file's author as well as its owner and group. While reviewing that patch, the topic came up: which order should the author, owner, and group be listed?
For example, suppose a file 'foo' is owned by 'eggert', has author 'ams', and group 'staff'. Here are some plausible outputs for the command 'ls --author -l foo': -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert staff ams 15460 May 18 15:28 foo -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert ams staff 15460 May 18 15:28 foo -rw-rw-r-- 1 ams eggert staff 15460 May 18 15:28 foo Which of these outputs is preferable and why? A similar issue arises with the chown command, e.g., which of the following should set the author to 'ams'? chown eggert:staff:ams foo chown eggert:ams:staff foo chown ams:eggert:staff foo Presumably the chown-command order should be the same as the ls order. In earlier private discussion on this topic, I made this point: The owner and author are uids whereas the group is a gid, and it seems to me that the uids should be kept together in the listing. ams replied: Actually, wouldn't it be easier and more compatible to have it in the [owner:group:author] order? If you specify an empty author field (owner::group) that becomes quite weird instead of using something along the lines of "owner:group" where one can quietly discard the author field. You also change the group more often than the author of a file, which is only changed once, when the file is created. I also asked: In practice, how common is it in the Hurd for the author to differ from the owner? What are typical situations where this occurs? Perhaps if I understood this, I would see why it makes sense to put the info in a particular order. And ams replied: No idea, as this feature hasn't been implemented yet it hasn't been used. To be frank, I don't understand what use this field has, why not just put a "Written by:" tag at the top of the source code/document/whatever. Which one can then later view with `head'. The only time I can think that it has any real use is for binary files, like who compiled a specific binary. You will have to ask Thomas Bushnell about this. _______________________________________________ Help-hurd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-hurd
