Re: Summary: What to do with expired signatures

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[e-mail]>]

Eric,

An unintended consequence of moving the foci of XPG / POSIX standardization
from sections 2, 3, 4 (kernel, library and driver APIs, respectively) and
section 5 (file formats), to sections 1 and 8 (usr and root cmds), was that
the white spaces in the output of the long format (-l) of the ls.1 got
specified. Naturally, the standards conformance test suite eventually
included a test for the -l option of ls. Mercifully, I've forgotten which
way was "wrong", N spaces or N/8 tabs, but the fix (to obtain conformance)
broke more tools that harbored secret knowledge about white space ... 

Now there really was a good reason to specify this, it is handy when the
l10n guys and gals are putting in inobvious date formats with surprising
display character length properties, but we hadn't thought of that at the
time we took that sip of the standards koolaid.

Uh, I was a primary co-author of Spec 1170, so the egg is on my, err, napkin.

I've no problem with the whois-fix proto-wg attempting to find-and-fix (or
search-and-destroy) the odd whois (or isn't) formats. More fun with lex and
yacc. However, the utility of standardizing the text format here escapes me.

Eric

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