On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 10:10:51PM -0400, Jeff Squyres wrote: > 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.
Understood. > 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. Yeah I don't really know the history of both projects entirely. I believe there is an older wipe command that has existed longer and that the sourceforge project is a newer implementation (that is being actively developed). I also know that PGP has/had a wipe option (though I don't believe it ever installed under the name wipe it was just a parameter on the command line). > 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. I'm hesitant to do this because a) I'm not the maintainer for the package. b) The issues you raise with breaking automated scripts. c) I'm not involved with the cluster stuff at all. > 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". That would definantely help once you drop using the wipe name. However, I think I have a better solution for now. It would put us a little ahead of the you guys on renaming but should maintain backwards compatability. 3. Rename wipe in lam-runtime to lamwipe. Rename the wipe command wipe.wipe. Use the update-alternatives process to provide the wipe command. Setting lam-runtime's wipe at a higher priority so in the case where both packages were installed lame-runtime would own the wipe command. This would avoid your concerns with lam users getting the secure file deletetion tool on accident. Unfortunately this is a Mandrake only solution for the time being, but would definately stop distlint from emailing me every week about the issue. Does anyone see an issue with doing this? Since the lam-runtime maintainer isn't replying should I just go ahead and do it? -- Ben Reser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://ben.reser.org "What upsets me is not that you lied to me, but that from now on I can no longer believe you." -- Nietzsche
