[U-Boot-Users] Delete all env vars except read onlys

Detlev Zundel
2008-02-15T15:52:07Z

Hi Wolfgang,

> In message <200802140620.15102.sr@denx.de> you wrote:
>>
>> I would still prefer the version with the '--force' parameter. Just my 2
>> cents.
>
> I really don't want to have this, for two reasons: 1) U-Boot doesn't
> do "Do you really want to" confirmations, because these don't fit into
> the Unix design philisophy; 2) U-Boot doesn't do GNU style long
> command line switches (for several reasons, memory footprint being one
> of them).

As I hinted at in my other mail, git is my prime example of living up to
the spirit of unix - and still many commands there, e.g. git-push need a
'-f' to prevent clobbering costly changes inadvertently.

In my opinion your argument 1) is not true as it stands. Unix wants its
users to be as productive as possible and typing two extra characters
when ommitting them can cause hours of work is definitely in this
spirit.

Exaggerating your argument I would ask why you do not work only as root
on your machine. In U-Boot we do not have this "user" level of
protection so IMHO it makes sense to have at least a bit of it.

It is true however that we don't have any kind of option processing, so
probably '-force' wasn't a good choice to begin with. What about only
using "all" as a "conformative" option?

Cheers
Detlev

--
Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add,
but rather when there is nothing more to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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