On 07/19/2017 12:03 PM, Lance E Sloan wrote: > Hi, Eric. > > Thank you for the thoughtful response. I regret that I have trouble > understanding your point of view, though. Please know that I do not mean > any disrespect. I'd appreciate it if you could explain why you're opposed > to adding new features to cut (or to comm).
I'm not opposed to well-justified new features. It's just that the bar for justifying new features is rather high (it's a lot of code to add to get field reordering, and that code has to be tested; it is also a question of how many users will rely on that extension. A testsuite addition is mandatory as part of adding the new feature, if the new feature is worth adding). Furthermore, on the topic of cut, we've already had the discussion multiple times over multiple years: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/rejected_requests.html which links to http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2012-12/msg00115.html which links to http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2005-06/msg00125.html Reading some of those threads show that there's not outright opposition, so much as "why isn't awk good enough, since it already is standardized and does what you want" - mixed with quotes like "In spite of all of that, the existing behavior (of not honoring the user-specified field/column-number ordering) is non-intuitive enough that I'd consider a patch adding an option to make cut provide the more sensible behavior." And remember that patches DO speak louder than words. Repeating a mantra of "this new feature would be great, can someone else implement it for me" is a lot easier to ignore than "this new feature helped me, and here's the patch for your consideration". So I'm not outright rejecting the idea, so much as stating that you are not the first to propose it, and none of the previous proposals got it incorporated. I haven't made any decisions about the benefit of a change to comm, and will leave that to other maintainers to chime in. > Even if this feature suggestion isn't approved by the GNU community, I will > implement it for my own use anyway. Absolutely! That's the beauty of free software, that you ARE permitted to improve it and share your changes, whether or not other people pick up on your changes. -- Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3266 Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org
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