[PATCH] remove long options from hdparm + minor bugfixes

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Thu Jun 1 13:56:54 UTC 2006


On Wednesday 31 May 2006 7:18 pm, Tito wrote:
> On Thursday 1 June 2006 00:53, Rob Landley wrote:
> > On Wednesday 31 May 2006 6:03 pm, Tito wrote:
> > > Hi to all,
> > > this patch:
> > > 1)	removes totally long option support from hdparm,
> > > 	but the --Istdin functionality is preserved because now the program
> > > 	reads from stdin if no device names are specified:
> > >
> > > 	cat /proc/ide/hda/identify |./busybox hdparm
> >
> > Hmmm...  The hdparm people are used to dumps its --help when you run it
> > without arguments.
>
> They will wonder why the program blocks... ;-P
> hit Ctrl-c
> do hdparm -h
> and discover the truth!!!

So it's horrible usability that it's possible to recover from.  This is 
generally the case even if they have to reboot and reinstall...

The sad part is that it will only block (with no message) if it's configured 
certain ways, and when configured other ways it'll print out a usage message.  
And this is a compile time behavior change, which sucks.

> > Could you stick in a check for stdin isn't a TTY?
>
> I could, but our menuconfig system and the verbose usage describe the non
> standard behaviour, so maybe it is not worth the trouble....

And of course having a man page is the perfect substitute for minimal levels 
of usability.

We have the code to do this in gunzip already...

> Ciao,
> Tito

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.



More information about the busybox mailing list