Re: xterm: either fix it, or remove it. please.

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>]

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On Thu, 12 Nov 2009, Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:

> 2009/11/12 Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>:
> > On Thu, 12 Nov 2009, Frans Meulenbroeks wrote:
> >
> >> 2009/11/12 Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@crashcourse.ca>:
> >>
> >> > the above is switching on a symbolic mode, and that final line is
> >> > using sed to convert the symbolic mode to the corresponding numeric
> >> > mode for installation.
> >> >
> >> >  that worked fine a few years back, but it fails on newer linux
> >> > distros for which the long listing might have a trailing period, as
> >> > does my fedora 11 system:
> >> >
> >> > $ ls -l /etc/passwd
> >> > -rw-r--r--. 1 root root 2474 2009-11-09 14:59 /etc/passwd
> >> >          ^ there
> >>
> >> Hm. I've never ever heard about this trailing period. Where does it
> >> come from/how was it introduced?
> >
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_FAQ#Why_does_ls_show_a_dot_.28..29_or_a_plus_.28.2B.29_at_the_end_on_the_file_modes_for_some_files.3F
> >
> > rday
> > --
>
> Robert thanks for the link. Didn't know that. Apparently one is
> never too old to learn something new.

  i was a bit puzzled the first time i saw that, and had to ask around
about what it meant.

> So it is not really fedora specific, but it is SELinux specific. Do
> we want to support SELinux as build host ? (the ideal solution of
> course would be to have our own ls in the cross dir).
>
> Frans.
>
> PS: Personally I think it is a bad idea to change the output format of
> a utility that is more than 30 years old and that is so widespread.

  i have to agree but, frankly, i'm astonished that that fundamental a
change caused breakage in only one package out of about 10,000 (i
tripped across that building beagleboard-demo-image -- it was the only
package that failed because of that; i actually think that shows an
amazing level of robustness).

> (and I did not even see an obvious way to get the old behaviour).

  i'm checking right now if there's an option to "ls" to turn *off*
that feature, but i don't see one offhand.  perhaps a better lesson is
that the way xterm's sinstall.sh script works is really hacky, using
sed to allegedly reproduce a file's existing mode settings.  perhaps
there's a simpler way to get that effect without dragging "sed" into
it.  but, again, if only one package was affected, maybe just hack up
an xterm fix and move on, and deal with things on a case-by-case
basis as they come up.

rday
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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

            Linux Consulting, Training and Kernel Pedantry.

Web page:                                          http://crashcourse.ca
Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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