Re: [Gnu-arch-users] minor extension to arch protocol

[Colin Walters]

On Sun, 2003-11-16 at 22:40, Tom Lord wrote:

> You are rather younger than me, I infer.

Maybe; I'm 25.  But as long as I've been using GNU/Linux (since about
1998) this has been the case.

> We have already seen demonstrations of upward compatible patches to,
> for example bash, that fix this.
> 
> That I am a more responsive maintainer than bash maintainers is not an
> excuse to bash me.

I'm not bashing you at all (or was that just a pun?).  And we're not
just talking about bash; specifically I use zsh, and to it '=foo' means
$(which foo).  I use the = shortcut fairly often too, so I don't want to
just make it un-special.

>     > But it really does
>     > bother me, and has from the start.  And it's not just me; about half of
>     > everyone I introduce to arch comments on it.  
> 
> Yes, I know.  From an engineering perspective, some aspects of the
> explosion of interest in GNU/Linux have been destructive.  This is one
> of them.

I don't understand the relation between the interest in GNU/Linux and
this issue...

>     > If we can fix tagging-method, I think there'd be many fewer
>     > complaints.
> 
> I'd rather fix the problem than the symptom.

But even if we were to fix all existing software (hard) and all existing
installations (very hard), why should a revision control system be
hardcoding its sorting order preferences?

Why don't you (and others who like this) fix your software so that files
that are classified as source as according to "tla inventory" are
displayed first?  Why should everyone else have to type this = thing
when it's useless?

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