Re: bug in hostname

[Martin MOKREJŠ]

On Tue, 7 Oct 2003, Paul Jarc wrote:

> Jim Meyering <address@hidden> wrote:
> > But bear in mind that the vast majority of users don't have a
> > problem because they use these tools via a distribution mechanism
> > (.rpm, .deb) that arranges not to install programs like hostname
> > that can cause trouble.
>
> Still, it would be nice to make less work for packagers, and for users
> installing from source.

Imagine case of people having some non-linux/freebsd os. like Tru64Unix or
Irix. Sometimes it's advantageous to have GNU utilities, imagine find(1),
(ls), cp(1), rm(1), tar(1), grep(1), sed(1), xargs(1) etc. I believe it's a
good idea to install them into /usr/local and keep vendor supplied
binaries in /usr. Unfortunately, I like in general the GNU stuff and
therefore I prepend to PATH /usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH.

And that's how I got into the trouble.

>
> > What's wrong with coreutils' kill?
>
> Just a missing feature.  With util-linux's kill, you can say "kill
> progname"; it will look for processes called progname running as the
> same user who invoked kill.  Not such a big deal, but it's handy.
>
> > I'm open to the idea of not installing hostname.
>
> The GNU(/Hurd) system will need a hostname program, so throwing away
> this one may not be a great idea.  Adding the -s and --fqdn options to
> GNU hostname might make the most sense.  C.f. the GNU sysutils
> project, intended to replace util-linux.

Yes, please make it backwards compatible, at least make in accept the
options and silently do nothing.

-- 
Martin Mokrejs <address@hidden>, <address@hidden>
PGP5.0i key is at http://www.natur.cuni.cz/~mmokrejs
MIPS / Institute for Bioinformatics <http://mips.gsf.de>
GSF - National Research Center for Environment and Health
Ingolstaedter Landstrasse 1, D-85764 Neuherberg, Germany
tel.: +49-89-3187 3683 , fax: +49-89-3187 3585