On Sun, Jul 05, 2015 at 01:16:02PM +0200, Christian Seiler wrote: > A good example for this is the open(1) command: way back when Linux was > still in its infancy, somebody decided it would be a good idea to have > a command to run something on a different virtual text console, and > they named it 'open'. This is the reason why you have 'xdg-open' for > opening files according to their mime type (and that command is not > that known, because of its name), because 'open' was already taken.
On one hand, had xdg-open used "open" anyway, nothing of relevance would actually have broken, since nobody uses the original "open" anymore. But in 5-10 years time we might have the same situation again, when xdg-open is obsolete. On the other hand, "open" on Mac OS X does something useful today, because they've made the pragmatic choice to break with the poor choice of the past. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20150706085441.ga10...@chew.redmars.org