Re: ncat 5.10BETA handling of -l -p is not compatible with nc-1.10

[Daniel Roethlisberger <daniel () roe ch>]

Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux () googlemail com> 2010-01-10:
> On Sunday 10 January 2010 09:47, Kris Katterjohn wrote:
> > > Do you understand why compatibility is important?
> >
> > Do you understand why convenience is important?  We as authors and users
> > shouldn't be stuck with command arguments from over a decade ago
>
> You answered my question. You do not understand why compatibility
> is important. Thank God other depelopers do, and, for example,
> coreutils dd is not going to become "more convenient" and ditch
> its "stupid and non-standard" if=FILE style parameters.

Unlike netcat, dd and it's if=FILE style parameters are actually
covered by standards such as POSIX.1-2008 [1] and implementors do
a pretty good job at being compatible.  With netcat, there
(AFAIK) neither is a standard nor do the implementations agree on
a common syntax.  In absence of standards, I fail to see how it
makes more sense to follow the traditional netcat than it makes
to follow, say, the nc(1) part of the FreeBSD base system, or any
other alternative which has some significant ``market share''.

[1] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/dd.html

-- 
Daniel Roethlisberger
http://daniel.roe.ch/
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