Ian Murdock wrote:
> And that would break... what, exactly?
We don't know.
We know it has the potential of breaking scripts that,
for better or worse, parse the output of "/bin/df".
It can (and has been) argued that those scripts are
already not portable to Linux, since the output is
different there. This implies that the portability
argument is rather aimed at the existing Solaris user
base as they upgrade their systems to newer versions of
Solaris, and this change would make it harder for those
customers to upgrade their systems.
In some sense, this analysis doesn't matter because we
already promised our existing customers that we would
/NOT/ change these interfaces out from under them in
future Minor releases of the ON5.x component of Solaris.
Note that we (the community and the ARC) could easily
approve a case NOW to change df's default. The ARC
opinion for such a case would say "This project ...
is approved for integration into a Major release of
the ON Consolidation".
The question then becomes one of what this "approval with
an integration constraint" really means?
Since the Nevada development gate was chartered as a
Minor release, by our own rules, we can't simply change
interfaces that we promised would be Stable. This means
that we can't allow this kind of change to go into Nevada.
However, it could go into a Major release chartered gate,
if we had one. We don't have one today, but we could get
one by either
A) Re-chartering Nevada to be a Major release gate, or
B) Leaveing Nevada as it is and chartering a new Major
release train (Indiana, anyone? :-).
With a Major release gate, the project team would now have
a place to integrate their incompatible changes.
Of course, the ramifications of putting a Major release train
into motion are complex and non-trivial: One big danger of a
Major release is that the result might be inappropriate or
unusable by some segment of our existing customer base.
This is balanced against the danger that restricting ourselves
to only a Minor release might be inappropriate or unusable by
some segment of our potential new customer base.
Do you want the Red pill or the Blue one?
-John
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