John Hawkinson wrote: > Michael Richardson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote on Sun, 30 Sep 2001 at > 20:39:46 -0400 in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > The "tcpdump" argv[0] would still remain to establish defaults like > > tcpdump, but that the new name could have different defaults and saner > > command line options. > > Programs that change their behavior based on argv[0] just suck. > They are confusing and hard to script and annoying. Please don't > do this.
I disagree. Programs that change their behavior based on argv[0] (polymorphic) are no different in invocation from those that are implemented as multiple binaries, and have the advantage that it is easy to tell when the versions of the various programs are in sync: all the binaries are the same inode. In addition, polymorphic programs usually have fewer bugs in the argument processing code and more consistent argument semantics, because there's only one block of source code for parsing the command line. Pray tell -- what problems have you had with invoking polymorphic programs? Why do they suck for you? -- Jefferson Ogata <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> NOAA Computer Incident Response Team (N-CIRT) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - This is the TCPDUMP workers list. It is archived at http://www.tcpdump.org/lists/workers/index.html To unsubscribe use mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?body=unsubscribe
