Text written by Scott D. Yelich at 07:02 PM 3/23/99 -0700:
>
>Regarding the wrapper -- yes, the wrapper is a decent idea. Then
>everyone would have to be educated (ie: forced?) to use that command and
>not an alternative such as npasswd, etc. Of course, the only way to
>do this would probably be to disable the old passwd (and wonder
>what that breaks). It's not all that simple, in the end.
I'm not familiar with npasswd and other alternatives. My solution would
have involved renaming passwd to something else (perhaps "passwd.orig"),
naming my wrapper "passwd", and simply having it validate arguments before
passing them on to passwd.orig.
I agree it's not that simple, but it's not necessarily that complex, either.
>Right. I prefer the idea of having decent documentation on things so
>that I don't have to read the author's mind.
I agree. I'm in the process of writing a few (very small) open-source
projects right now, and I'm keeping some of the things I've seen on this
list in the back of my mind as I write the docs.
I've also got a wonderful real-world case to observe: we've got a new
sysadmin here where I work, and after two or three months here, he's still
going "Where in the docs did you find that?" (For example, just yesterday,
we got spammed by someone in China, so I dropped their IP numbers into a
few tcpserver deny rules. Then I had to show him where in the docs to find
the info on that.) And this guy is not a newbie or a luser; he's an
experienced Unix/Linux sysadmin. He is, however, a Qmail newbie, and seeing
his reaction to the docs is causing me to want to make *really sure* that
my own documentation doesn't do that to people.
Which might result in my dumbing it down too much, but that's another problem.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Kai MacTane
System Administrator
Online Partners.com, Inc.
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>From the Jargon File: (v4.0.0, 25 Jul 1996)
fix /n.,v./
What one does when a problem has been reported too many times to
be ignored.
