[Toybox] Logjam broken!

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Sun Apr 15 18:43:23 PDT 2012


On 04/15/2012 03:22 PM, Andre Renaud wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>> Andre: I'm sorry, but I completely replaced the ls implementation you
>> did. I started adapting it and then realized that the sorting and
>> directory descent logic (required by the standard) required more control
>> over the traversal order than the existing design gave.  You actually
>> _can't_ deal with the command line arguments individually, you have to
>> put them together into a pile and deal with them in multiple passes (one
>> of which is sorting them, and there's also lookahead for the indent and
>> -C logic, plus that whole "print the name: or don't print the name"
>> logic, which is sort of evil really). It took me a couple weeks of
>> poking at it to get the basics right, and it's still got bugs (-R isn't
>> currently recursing properly, for example).
>>
>> I left your copyright notice on the file because your version did
>> provide me with an important starting point (albeit the insight was "no,
>> I can't make it work this way").  I can take it off if you don't feel
>> like getting emails about this implementation.
> 
> Hi Rob,
> I'm not fussed either way - feels a bit bad having my copyright
> attributed to something I didn't write, so perhaps removing it is the
> best idea.
> 
> Being involved in this mailing list (and to a very small degree the
> development) has really opened my eyes to the complexity of the
> standard command line tools. In some cases it definitely seems
> excessive, but I guess necessary to cover all the functionality that
> people have become accustomed to.

It's not just what people are used to, it's what existing software
depends on. What I'm more worried about are shell scripts, such as build
scripts in software packages. They exercise an unknown amount of
behavior out of these commands, and do so in a way that's already been
written and already works, and would be a bit of a pain for third
parties to debug after the fact if the tool behavior changes significantly.

Part of my goal here is to make android a self-hosting development
environment. That implies a certain amount of compatability with
existing linux systems, or at least the standards they implement.

Rob
-- 
GNU/Linux isn't: Linux=GPLv2, GNU=GPLv3+, they can't share code.
Either it's "mere aggregation", or a license violation.  Pick one.

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