this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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I agree. The behavior of
rmandcatandcpandmvandddand many other utilities don't necessarily have the interface I would prefer, but they are too widely used for it to be helpful to radically change them. It's somewhat unfortunate that these names are already reserved, but I don't think it's necessary to change them.In the same way, I don't have a problem with packages having generic names but not actually being useful: I've read that the
requestsandurllib3packages for Python aren't being maintained very well, but I don't mind that as long as I can accomplish things while following best practices.Because of this, I'm not afraid to use names like "getRequest" or "result", especially if they were generated with an automatic refactoring, and I'm not upset when I see similarly generic names being used with source code I'm changing, since I know that the second name for something that's similar to an existing thing will have to actually be descriptive, but the first name is likely to not be.
I have another example of how I'd apply these thoughts: the process for developing v2+ modules for the Go programming language strikes me as inelegant, so I would probably prefer to just create an entirely new repository rather than try to attempt that.
Well in this particular case, zcat failing with error on uncompressed text isn't a behaviour worth preserving.
It should do the expected zcat behaviour, which is just print the text.
I have a hard time imagining a scenario where you call zcat and would prefer an error rather than a useable output