On Mon, 21 Jul 2003, Ben Reser wrote:
> Can you guys please rename the wipe command in lam to lamwipe? It's
> more consistent with other command names and does not conflict with the
> wipe project's wipe command: http://wipe.sourceforge.net/
I'm afraid that we have a lot of history with the "wipe" command --
there's a lot of LAM users and automated scripts out there that would
break if we renamed the command to lamwipe. There's also a whole
bunch of LAM tutorials on the web (ours included) that directly refer
to the "wipe" command.
The situation that I really want to avoid is a LAM user using "wipe
hostfile", and instead of shutting down their LAM universe, the file
named "hostfile" is totally erased from the filesystem. That would be
*most* unexepected behavior from a LAM user's perspective.
Don't get me wrong -- we've had these discussions (internally) too --
I'd love to rename it for the reasons that you cite, but I don't want
to break backwards compatability and other automated systems that
depend on the name "wipe". wipe is, after all, one of LAM's primary
commands. Granted, we have deprecated "wipe" in favor of "lamhalt",
but it is still available as a command of last resort (e.g., if
lamhalt fails, wipe can still be used to kill the LAM universe).
>From its SF project page, it looks like the "wipe" project has been
around since late 1999. The earliest CVS commit I see for LAM's
"wipe" command is May 4, 1993 -- over 6.5 years prior to the SF wipe
project's inception.
Given all this, I'm reluctant to ditch the name "wipe".
All that being said, I present 2 options:
1. LAM's license is very BSD-ish. If this is for the Mandrake cluster
distribution (I'm guessing that by the CC), for example, you are
more than welcome to rename the command if you wish. All it would
require is a quick change in tools/wipe/Makefile.am. I would
strongly encourage you, however, to document this in a very obvious
location so that any present LAM users who migrate over to
Mandrake's (or whoever's) LAM distribution are fully aware of the
command name change.
2. Recognizing that "wipe" is a poor name, starting with LAM/MPI 7.1,
we'll change the primary name of "wipe" to "lamwipe" (we'll update
all documentation, as well, and mention that "wipe" is formally
deprecated). The name "wipe" will be a sym link pointing to the
name "lamwipe" so that backwards compatability will be preserved
(for a while). Perhaps sometime after that, we can ditch the name
"wipe".
Does that help?
--
{+} Jeff Squyres
{+} [EMAIL PROTECTED]
{+} http://www.lam-mpi.org/
