>Peter C. Norton wrote: >> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 01:36:59PM -0500, Shawn Walker wrote: >>> On 11/04/07, I. Szczesniak <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>>> I don't think this will happen without a major shift to a more >>>> customer-friendly policy at Sun. >>> When is "break my customer's stuff" seen as friendly? >> >> Can you quantify: >> >> 1) How many of your customers things are going to break >> 2) What change will do the breaking > >What changes are you proposing? How can we know what will break >without a list of what you want changed? This whole conversation is a >lot of hand waving without any specific proposals. > >A lot of brain damage in /usr/bin utilities can be fixed without >breaking them - adding new flags that were never used before is >usually completely compatible, and trivial to do.
Indeed; and one of the issues with how we did xpg4/xpg6 initially was that new flags/features were added only to the standard compliant variants. That was wrong and we are trying to rectify that (if we haven't already for the most part) There are some arcania which will cause breakage because of different behaviour, e.g., between /bin/sh and /bin/ksh. Without knowning what people do or run that is a difficult problem to phatom; you cannot, e.g., check this using interviews with customers. They will not be able to tell you. Tooling is needed, but we certainly should fix utilities to include features which would otherwise provoke syntax or usage errors. Casper _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED]
