On 3/25/2010 1:53 PM, Sergey Poznyakoff wrote: > Perhaps, it is or it is not. It just means I cannot all of a sudden > change this default just because one of the usere deems it wrong. There > well may be hundreds of others who do no share that opinion, or worse yet, > who depend on that particular behavior of GNU tar.
Depending on broken behavior is itself, broken behavior. Every other unix utility writes its output to /dev/null when asked to. Tar should do so when asked as well, rather than silently ignore your instructions and fundamentally alter its behavior. At the very least it should print a warning informing you that it has decided to ignore your instructions and not do as you asked. What's next? rm deciding that you didn't REALLY mean to delete that file and just pretending it succeeded? Sheesh!
