Nicolas Williams wrote: > On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 07:48:21AM -0700, Garrett D'Amore wrote: > > I. Szczesniak wrote: > > >Could you elaborate the difference between Committed and Committed > > >Obsolete? > > > > Committed Obsolete means we can't remove it, but you're still > > discouraged from using it in new code. That's the case with -b -- it is > > used to indicate a count in blocks (512 bytes), but the option was > > removed from the POSIX standard over confusion about what was meant by a > > "block" (is it a block of bytes, or a block of characters?) > > Actually, it's more subtle than that. "Committed Obsolete" is a > composition of "Committed" and "Obsolete". The former relates to when > backwards incompatible changes are allowed, the latter relates to when > removal is allowed. > > Which means that "Committed Obsolete" really means "we won't break this > interface, but we are free to remove it after <date>
Well, I then set the date for removal of option "-b" to the 1. January of 2666... :-) > (and in a suitable > release vehicle)". Well, the "-b" option was just added to AT&T AST "tail" and since the matching code is tiny I'd say we just keep it forever for both interoperabilty and backwards-compatibilty. ---- Bye, Roland -- __ . . __ (o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org \__\/\/__/ MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer /O /==\ O\ TEL +49 641 3992797 (;O/ \/ \O;)
