Re: dd patch to output transfer rate, byte count, and time

[James Youngman]

On Sun, Nov 14, 2004 at 10:57:51PM -0800, Paul Eggert wrote:

> In theory this change might break some scripts.  Does anybody think
> this will be a problem in practice?  If so, I suppose we could enable
> the new behavior only conditionally.

Personally, I think people worry too much about breaking other
people's scripts.  The scripts should really written to be more
portable anyway.  For cases where there is likely to be breakage, you
could always give advance notice of a planned change.

After all, the whole point of POSIX is that it provides a shared
expectation of the capabilities and properties of the system
interfaces, so I personally would have no qualms about changing the
behaviour of GNU tools as long as the result is POSIX compliant.

Obviously there are many exceptions to this 'rule' (for example
removing the "z" option to GNU tar would probably be a bad plan) but
perhaps not as many as some people think.  In particular, if the
result is an improvement I'm all for it.  If you feel a bit uncertain
about it, perhaps an explanation in the "Standards Compliance" section
of the documentation would be a good idea.

A related issue of course is that not everybody has a copy of the
POSIX standard to hand, though the current version is available on the
web.

Regards,
james.