Both sides in this discussion seem to have valid concerns: FOR making --wildcard the default
- compatibility with upstream - compatibility with standards - compatibility with other distributions - whatever reasons POSIX had for this were probably sensible - upstream's judgement on this is likely to be correct AGAINST making --wildcard the default - very difficult to figure out what scrips are affected - mysterious breakage far into the future - requires grubbing around and inserting --wildcard in many places As a compromise that addresses some of the issues I would suggest the following: go with upstream, but add some convenience code, to whit: (1) Hot-wire tar to check an environment variable TAR_WILDCARD_DEFAULT and activate the --wildcard option if set. (2) Hot-wire tar to print a warning message to stderr if it (a) is defaulting to the --no-wildcard behaviour and, (b) it notices a filename that, had tar instead been in --wildcards mode, would have been expanded. If stderr is not hooked up, the warning could reasonably be sent using syslog() instead. I wouldn't bother adding any mechanism to shut these warnings off; if one really wants them shut off, use either --wildcards or --no-wildcards. Point (1) would allow people to easily check if some breakage is caused by this change, or to use old scripts/sources without contortions; and point (2) would serve to catch problems in scripts that might otherwise elude us. Point (2) would be especially helpful given that we're coming up on a release, so it would be nice to find and correct all affected scripts as rapidly as possible. -- Barak A. Pearlmutter Hamilton Institute & Dept Comp Sci, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland http://www.bcl.hamilton.ie/~barak/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]