[568] in Release_7.7_team
Re: New options for add
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Craig Fields)
Mon Jun 3 14:45:56 1996
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 1996 14:45:49 -0400
From: Craig Fields <cfields@MIT.EDU>
To: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Cc: release-team@MIT.EDU
> I claim that -m is needless complication...
It sounds like your argument is at least partly based on concern from
an implementation standpoint. I actually implemented this stuff
yesterday, and it added only a slight amount.
> Rationale: "add -f" is fairly useless right now except in your
> dotfiles, since it doesn't have any reliable behavior unless you know
> what path you started with.
I don't agree. This implies that lockers which are for some reason
desirable in the front of the user's path have usually already been
previously added to the tail. I would imagine that most lockers that
need to be in the front of the user's path are useless unless there,
and so never would have been added to the tail to begin with;
instructions for using the locker would have already said to do an add
-f. If they have already been added to the tail, it was probably done
in the user's dotfiles, and if they want it moved to the head, they
probably now always want it at the head and so should edit their
dotfiles anyway.
The reason I didn't want -m to be the default was because it does add
a few sed invocations for a feature which some people may not care
about (although I've realized I can cut the number in half of what I
have now).
For people who want -m default, they can add it to their add_flags
variable.
Craig
