find -lname and -ilname implemented

[Peter Jeremy]

On Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 03:53:55PM -0500, Mike Meyer wrote:
>On Sat, 23 Feb 2008 12:05:46 -0700 (MST) Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
>> It adds functionality.  That doesn't make it gratuitous.  One might
>> just as well call 'POSIX' compatibility gratuitous.  Like it or not,
>> the GNU utilities represent a de-facto standard that we must conform
>> to.
>
>POSIX is a well-defined standard, endorsed by a large number of
>companies. GNU's just a bag of programs which only have one
>commonality as far as I can tell: the software license. There's
>another de-facto standard from a company in Redmond, that's *much*
>more popular than GNU, and probably more consistent. If FreeBSD is
>going to conform to implementations instead of standards, I'd rather
>it conform to that one than GNU.

I would also support POSIX in preference to GNU.

IMHO, this discussion is all about portability.  Warner wants to extend
the FreeBSD find(1) so it can handle some non-portable constructs that
he has run into.  If those extensions are not incompatible with existing
FreeBSD and POSIX and are generally useful without significantly bloating
find(1) then it is probably OK to add them.

At the same, time, the find(1) man page needs to clearly distinguish
between the parts of find that are POSIX-complaint, the parts that are
GNU extensions and the parts that are [Free]BSD extensions.  This is
necessary so that when I'm developing tools, I can avoid non-portable
extensions (unlike whoever developed the scripts Warner is trying to
use).  If the FreeBSD project does not make it clear what functionality
is safe to rely on then we run the risk of falling into the Linux trap
where people write bash scripts because they believe it is the standard.

-- 
Peter Jeremy
Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement
an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour.
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