On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 8:41 AM, Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:
>>>>>> On Mon, 23 Mar 2009, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>
>>> Now that "dosed" is going to be banned, what would people think of
>>> "newins" (and the other "new*" commands) accepting "-" as the first
>>> argument?
>
>> There's a slightly different variation in exheres-0: as well as do*
>> and new*, there's also here*, which you use like this:
>
>>     hereins foo <<'END'
>> stuff
>> END
>
> Why would we need a new command for this? The minus sign denoting
> standard input is fairly common with other utilities.
>
>> It magically barfs, rather than hanging indefinitely, if you forget
>> to give it some input.
>
> I guess the same could be done for "newins -", if you think that it is
> necessary (test for stdin being a terminal?). But I don't really see
> the point of it, since such a mistake would be noticed immediately
> when testing the ebuild.

No, they aren't 'noticed immediately'.  The ebuild hangs and then the
author spends 10 minutes trying to figure out why.  If its trivial to
implement..I don't see a downside to such a feature.

>
>> The rationale for giving it a new name rather than overloading an
>> existing one is that some of the existing do* utilities don't take
>> just a single simple filename, so overloading would make the command
>> line somewhat convoluted.
>
> It doesn't make much sense to specify "-" as an argument for "do*",
> because the command would not know under which name the file should be
> installed. OTOH, all "new*" commands have exactly two arguments, so we
> could allow "-" for the first argument.
>
> Ulrich
>
>