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From: nazgul@apollo.uucp (Kee Hinckley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: Bickering
Message-ID: <358d0b09.b0a1@apollo.uucp>
Date: Thu, 18-Jun-87 18:07:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: apollo.358d0b09.b0a1
Posted: Thu Jun 18 18:07:00 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 22-Jun-87 01:08:58 EDT
References: <8706151717.AA02467@yale-eli.arpa>
Reply-To: nazgul@apollo.UUCP (Kee Hinckley)
Distribution: world
Organization: Apollo Computer, Chelmsford, MA
Lines: 49

In article <8706151717.AA02467@yale-eli.arpa> ram-ashwin@YALE.ARPA (Ashwin Ram) writes:
> >  Incidentally, I think someone once complained that the Aegis shell didn't even
> >  have parallel pipes.  I almost changed that at SR8, only to discover that a
> >  number of people were doing things like: "catf file | srf > file"
> >  (translation: "cat file | sort > file") and making any changes would break
> >  them quite badly.  Sigh.
> 
> My feeling is that disallowing "catf file | srf > file" is no worse than
> disallowing "srf file > file" (which many naive users also tend to do), and
> the advantages of parallel pipes outweigh this minor disadvantage anyway

Ah, but you don't have to answer the UCR from someone who didn't read the 
release notes and just trashed a weeks worth of work. :-)  Seriously, as I've
mentioned before, we tend to be very conservative when it comes to breaking
things.  In this case I didn't feel that the advantages were worth the risk.

> (e.g., having partial results output on the screen so that you can work with
> them while the command runs to completion).  For the same reason, it would be
> nice if LD .../?*.PAS, for example, printed your Pascal files as it listed
> them (similar to LS -R), rather than all together at the end.

I agree that would be nice, but the layering of wildcard expansion (via.
the CL_$ calls) is such that I think it would be difficult to change.
The underlying wildcard calls would have to save state, return a pathname
and then be able to restart (further more they would have to be able to
do this with multiple different wildcard requests interleaved).

--

Incidentally, on the subject of UCRs, I have to agree, they are NOT simple
to fill out, in fact I don't understand a number of the fields myself.

Remember that software development is an ongoing process, and just because
it's shipped that way now doesn't mean either that it won't change (hopefully
for the better :-) or that we like it that way.  I must say however that
this feedback has been very good for giving us a feel on what people are 
thinking, and encouraging in that so far I haven't seen any major issues
that we haven't already decided we should address in one way or another.
However, if you do have specific changes/bugs to report it would be wise
to use the UCR system, despite its foibles, since things posted here are
too likely to get missed or forgotten amidst the volume.

(All the usual disclaimers apply.)
                                                    -kee
-- 
UUCP: {mit-erl,yale,uw-beaver}!apollo!nazgul  ARPA: apollo!nazgul@eddie.mit.edu
I'm not sure which upsets me more; that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate 
everyone else's.