On Thu, Dec 04, 2014 at 07:40, Jason McIntyre wrote: > On Thu, Dec 04, 2014 at 12:03:01AM +0100, Ingo Schwarze wrote: >> Hi Ted, >> >> Ted Unangst wrote on Wed, Dec 03, 2014 at 05:41:41PM -0500: >> >> > Here's a revised diff against current. It just notes that the >> > extension spellings are such. >> >> I'm OK with that, discouraging gratuitiously non-standard syntax >> makes a lot of sense. >> > > when find(1) was imported into openbsd (or when openbsd itself was > imported), it came with the syntax "-and" and "-or". that was in > 1995, some 19 years ago. beyond that, well you'd be much better > qualified to tell me the history of it. > > so how have you gone from that to "gratuitiously non-standard syntax"? > if it has existed for 19 years (and before that), in this context it is > completely standard syntax.
I'll note that the -a and -o syntax was also supported since the initial import. It merely wasn't documented. All we're doing here is fixing a bug. In this case there is a real standard (as opposed to just historic practice) describing the utility. http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/find.html > i'll ask again: are we deprecating this syntax to such an extent that we > are actively asking people not to use it and, if so, why? I think so. I like the following rules. 1. Prefer the better alternative. 2. When alternatives are equal, prefer the officially standardized alternative. The BSD syntax under discussion here is certainly traditional, but it's also gratuitous. It's not better. It doesn't let me do something new and different, like the -print0 extension, that's actually useful. >From the perspective of an implementor, I find it very annoying trying to deal with all the de facto standards and variations that arise when people do not write their code and scripts to conform to the standard. This is like all those shell scripts that start with #!/bin/bash even though they run under plain sh just fine. I would not wish to further inflict that on others.
