On 18/05/07 08:25, Micah Cowan wrote: > Jan Claeys wrote: > >> Op donderdag 17-05-2007 om 15:18 uur [tijdzone -0700], schreef Micah >> Cowan: >> >>> A user, timothy, describing his difficulties at: >>> >>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/113154 >>> >>> describes his frustration as a new user, in discovering the hard way >>> that tar's default is to overwrite existing files, causing him to lose >>> important data. >>> >>> While I'm opposed to fixing the problem in tar itself, as traditional >>> usage frequently relies upon this behavior, I don't see why we >>> couldn't make the experience of using tar interactively a little >>> safer, by providing a default alias for tar in /etc/skel/.bashrc that >>> backs-up existing files. >>> >> I think GUI archive tools should ask or backup before overwriting by >> default, but changing the behaviour of command line tools might cause >> problems. >> > > Well, the nice thing about aliasing it instead of actually changing the > tool's behavior, is that it will only effect interactive sessions, and > can easily be overridden/removed by the user. >From a usability perspective I would feel that you're changing expected behaviour for existing users. I also note that there are no active aliases in my current (Edgy) installation, and that the ones there are commented out.
If you're going to do this, will you do an audit of all the packages available within Ubuntu to make sure that they too don't overwrite things? As I said, doing the right thing is hard. Personally I don't think the path you're advocating will make it better. Education is the key. Of course, you could come up with an alias like "tar_backup" and update the man page to reflect that. A completely different approach could be that the calls that actually write to a file check that the file does not exist. You could activate this with a system-wide flag, but I strongly suspect that this would be more work than the few words it took for me to write the idea. -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06" - E115°50'39" (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)() ..ASCII for Onno.. |>>? ..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. Proudly supported by Skipper Trucks, Highway1, Concept AV, Sony Central, Dalcon ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 8888 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
