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Salut,

On Sat, Jul 16, 2005 at 10:22:56PM -0400, Nathan J. Williams wrote:
> If vnd(4) did not exist and you were introducing all of these, you
> would have a point. As it is, you are talking about changing a decade
> of historical practice. If we didn't care about backwards
> compatibility we could change a lot of things (libc.12, anybody?), but
> we do care.

Well, there's no standard describing vnconfig so far, and if you read
"vnd" as "virtual node disk", you can as well read "vnconfig" as
"virtual node config", and "vncompress" as "virtual node compression".

However, I'm not sure if those "decade of historical practice" arguments
are really where it's at. We did break some compatibility with NetBSD 2.0,
and I'd bet that some of that is going to happen in NetBSD 3.0 as well.
If you do a major release upgrade, you should expect some evolution.
That said, you can do everything wrong for centuries. Would you like to
defend something like that with such an argument?

Whatever. I think the worst thing we can end up with is having two different
spellings for the same program, because one group wants it renamed, and the
other group wants to keep compatibility. I'm not convinced that vnconfig is
a case of naming inconsistency. I'm also not convinced that the new program
should be called vndcompress rather than vncompress.

Your opinion may differ, and you may even like the idea of having two different
names for the same program, and having all the users who ask "What's the
difference?", and "Why do you keep them both around?". I'm not sure if we need
this discussion though. And I'm also not sure if we should use the
old == wisdom argument.

				Tonnerre

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