Re: Port of OpenBSD's sdiff

On Sun, 24 Jun 2007, Gabor Kovesdan wrote:

> Robert Watson escribió:
>> On Sun, 24 Jun 2007, Stanislav Sedov wrote:
>>> 
>>> Personally, I see no point in adding -- style options, since the entire 
>>> our world build without them. GNU people can always install gnu- ports, we 
>>> just should insure they're posix compatible.
>>> 
>>> Furthermore, having -- and - style options in one world effectively broke 
>>> BSD's perfect look and feel:-)
>> 
>> On the other hand -- intentionally breaking scripts that have worked with 
>> FreeBSD for years isn't exactly the best way to make end-users happy.
>> 
> How you mean this? The current GNU textproc tools have those -- options. How 
> would that break scripts, then?
>
> Personally, I don't need or insist on having -- style options, but currently 
> we have those and people might have got used to them. If we change the 
> available options by just changing to the BSD-licensed ones without a deeper 
> look of their functionality, we might break POLA.
>
> Moreover, the BSD-licensed ones have some of those, too as I wrote before, 
> thus we just need to document them in the accompanying manpages. It's 
> strange, but the manpages don't cover the existing long options, maybe the 
> OpenBSD people didn't want people to use them.

Ah, OK -- I read the e-mail as stating that the options didn't exit in the 
OpenBSD tools, yet proposing moving to them, and hence was concerned about 
compatibility with existing scripts.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge