James Carlson wrote: > Roland Mainz writes: > > Joseph Kowalski wrote: > > > Thanks for the explanation, but the reason I'm inquiring is to determine > > > if the name libcmd is significant. > > > > > > As the thread points out, we have two libraries (both from AT&T) called > > > libcmd. Their contents are rather unrelated. Rather than merging them > > > (which seems very unclean), I'm investigating the possibility of renaming > > > one. If we renamed the libcmd associated with ksh, would anybody notice? > > > > > > Actually, if the answer is "Yes", we have a bigger problem. It is > > > considered > > > generally bad practice to mix Public and Private APIs in a library (but > > > its > > > not like we haven't made this error before). > > > > The answer is "yes" and it cannot be changed easily without running into > > other huge problems (e.g. we just trading one hell for another and I > > What are those huge problems?
For example we would break compatibility to all previous versions of ksh93 and David Korn, Glenn Fowler and Irek Szczesniak brought up serious concerns about that. libcmd is already used by many of the AST commands and applications (which means there is a huge software library depending on it) and in the case of Solaris I would expect that other, non-OS/Net applications should be able to use the |b_*()|-functions of the merged libcmd in the near future, too. ---- Bye, Roland -- __ . . __ (o.\ \/ /.o) roland.mainz at nrubsig.org \__\/\/__/ MPEG specialist, C&&JAVA&&Sun&&Unix programmer /O /==\ O\ TEL +49 641 7950090 (;O/ \/ \O;)
