ls(1) new command line options '-/' and '-%': CIFS system attributes support [PSARC/2007/394 FastTrack timeout 07/11/2007]

[John Plocher]

Joseph Kowalski wrote:
> Now, coming down from the 50,000 ft level, 

One "given" in the CLIP discussion was that all the commands within a 
logical grouping should have similar styles of options.  That is,
within the "posix" commands, one expects getopt-style behavior,
within the X11 set, one expects -display to work everywhere, etc.
A direct corollary of this is the assertion that it is undesirable
to have one command within such a family be gratuitously different
from the others (leaving aside the historical misfits like tar and
dd which simply serve to prove this point...).

Finally, there was an assumption that going back and retrofitting
a whole family with new command line behavior was infeasible at best;
at worst, it would be undesirable if it resulted in incompatible
changes being made to existing Committed interfaces.

This was to prevent us from spending time on efforts that, while well 
intentioned, would effectively make things more difficult for customers.
Efforts (for example) like adding "gnu-style" long options to /just/ the
ls(1) command. The failure mode here being that, if users found that if
	ls --help
worked while
	df --help
did not, we would see an increase in service calls noting the difference 
and asking that the new --help feature be added to the other posix
commands as well.

The thing that has changed with OpenSolaris is that the "infeasible"
argument can be reevaluated - while it my not make sense for Sun to
spend its limited development resources on fixing things that are not
exactly broken, there is nothing that says that others couldn't or
shouldn't be able to make a different decision for themselves.

That is, while I'm still against a piecemeal approach, there is room on
the table for a proposal to go thru all the commands in the family and
"improve" them.  In particular, Garrett's thread on the overlap between
ON/Posix commands and SFW/gnu ones and this ls(1) one could come
together in a larger plan/roadmap....

But, as Joe said, this particular thread on this particular alias
is probably NOT the right place to have that discussion.

   -John