On Monday 23 March 2009 13:01:46 Alec Warner wrote:
> 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.

this "feature" can be found in any number of existing utilities.  like sed.  
any argument along those lines is pretty weak.  using "-" as a shortcut name 
for stdin sounds logical to me considering it's a standard in the *nix world.

as for the portage utils checking stdin and reporting an error if it's trying 
to grab from the terminal, that's cheese someone can implement if they really 
want it.
-mike