Re: [Help-bash] Filename Expansion: Find Utility vs Bash Shell Pattern Matching

[Chet Ramey]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 6/19/15 9:16 AM, Eric Blake wrote:
> On 06/19/2015 06:12 AM, Greg Wooledge wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 02:18:06PM -0700, Michael Convey wrote:
>>> Isn't globbing narrow enough that a single library could be
>>> designed/extended/modularized to cover all desired features?
>>
>> Assume for the moment that this is true.  Today, you write a brand new
>> library function that does every kind of globbing currently used in
>> every application on the planet, from VMS to MS-DOS to Unix, in every
>> language from C to Perl to Python to Tcl to zsh to ....  And somehow
>> you manage to convince thousands of powerful developers to throw away
>> their individually customized pattern matching code and use yours.
>>
>> Tomorrow, someone will want another feature added to their shell.  So
>> they will introduce another option, or a syntax change, or whatever.
>> Then pretty soon we'll be right back to where we were before your
>> theoretical unification.
> 
> Unless, of course, they add the new feature to the grand unified
> library, for all clients of the shared library to pick up automatically.

When you start talking about things at this level, you've left the
realm of technology.  The problems you deal with here are social and
political, and most people don't want to deal with those.  Just look
at the BSD-license-vs-GPL conflicts.

- -- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    address@hidden    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2

iEYEARECAAYFAlWEI5wACgkQu1hp8GTqdKtYMQCffE37gJhR4t27T9rt18+TnSuu
CnwAoIyjmcx4XqyviVD/RqvEdItPjWTj
=MISf
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----