1 |
On Thursday 23 June 2011 23:06:00 Neil Bothwick did opine thusly: |
2 |
> > > b) it breaks the way portage displays his informations. |
3 |
> > > Without |
4 |
> > > autounmask the display of emerge shows what he is going to |
5 |
> > > do. With autounmask it shows what needs to be done. |
6 |
> > |
7 |
> > |
8 |
> > |
9 |
> > That is probably the most evil of all your reasons. There's an |
10 |
> > old dev joke about The Law Of Unintended Consequences, and it |
11 |
> > applies here - portage is now suddenly doing something new and |
12 |
> > 180 different from what it used to do. The normal response if |
13 |
> > "WTF?" followed by lots of indignation |
14 |
> |
15 |
> Ah, the old "we do it that way because that's the way it's always |
16 |
> been done" argument. Yes, it is different, yes, it may be confusing |
17 |
> when you first encounter the change - but that doesn't make it bad. |
18 |
|
19 |
The thing itself is neither inherently good nor bad. Implementing it |
20 |
in this way is bad. |
21 |
|
22 |
Why? |
23 |
|
24 |
Because the behaviour changed to something that is the exact opposite |
25 |
without any warning. Portage always used to tell what it will do. Now, |
26 |
simply by leaving the relevant options at the default, it tells me |
27 |
what it should do. How much more contrary to reasonable expectation |
28 |
can you get? |
29 |
|
30 |
Imagine if tcpwrappers did this. Imagine that hosts.deny was dropped |
31 |
and hosts.allow retained, also imagine that the desired config file |
32 |
name becomes hosts.tcpd but it will use hosts.allow if hosts.tcpd is |
33 |
not found. Now also imagine that the default interpretation of |
34 |
hosts.tcpd is now default deny, explicit allow. |
35 |
|
36 |
All your rules now suddenly invert. Chaos ensues. |
37 |
|
38 |
Sure, it's a contrived example, but it's also a very good example of |
39 |
why one never suddenly and without warning changes default behaviour |
40 |
to the opposite. |
41 |
|
42 |
Few people will argue against the existence of the new unmask options. |
43 |
Folk who want it can use it. Just don't make it the default in such a |
44 |
way that it catches old time users by surprise. |
45 |
|
46 |
|
47 |
-- |
48 |
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |