[BusyBox] Re: [patch] Why busybox xargs is broken.

[Glenn McGrath]

On Fri, 3 Oct 2003 15:26:17 -0500
Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:

> I spent half an hour trying to figure out what it was trying to do.
> 
> These are the first four comment lines:
> 	You can set bb_opt_complementaly as string with one or more
> 	complementaly or incongruously options.
> 	If sequential founded option haved from this string
> 	then your incongruously pairs unsets and complementaly make add
> 	sets.
> 
> First off, what's the difference between a "complementaly" option, an 
> "incongruously" option, and a regular option?  (I don't know what this
> IS, but it involves setting undocumented global variables rather than
> simply passing a parameter.  It's possible that this is a size
> optimization, but it should be documented if so.)

Complementary (typo) options are options where one option implies the
use of the other, e.g. the xargs -p option uses the -t even if it wasnt
specified.

Incongruously (had to look it up in the dictionary) means two options
dont belong together, e.g. the tar options c (create) and x (extract)
are incongruous, only one of them can be used. This is usefull because
we dont need to use conditions (which are relatively expensive) in the
applet to test the validity of the passed options.

Im not too sure about the last statement myself.

Its taken me a while to work it out as well, ive been delaying applying
it to the archival applets because i didnt understand it very well, i
should make more of an effort at that.


Glenn