[m0skit0]

Backwards compatibility is an evil illness that sometimes must be broken. It's for the good of evolution. I praise engineers that make such decisions, even if they are unpopular.

[TillE]

When there's a clear benefit, that's great. Feel free to scrap backwards compatibility when there's significant progress to be made in doing so.

This feels a lot more like a "color of the bike shed" choice. There are use cases where the new behavior makes sense, sure, but there are also plenty of cases where the old way is better. This isn't an upgrade, it's a lateral move.

[tinco]

So we have to continue with an ugly bikeshed for the rest of eternity? I think it's very important that whenever it is decided that objectively one way of doing it is better than another way that eventually that way finds itself to be the way it is.

You basically imply that this change is not big enough to warrant a break with backwards compatibility, but small discontinuities and hacks add up. If thinks like this aren't fixed every once in a while the system will be ridden with inconsistencies.

Besides, even though it hurts when you've inherited some crazy unreadable code that utilizes some obsoleted functionality I think it is always positive for the code quality when the chaos monkey comes around and breaks something.

edit: the downvote button is to indicate I am detrimental to the discussion, the reply button is for when you disagree with me :)

[sdoering]

>> edit: the downvote button is to indicate I am detrimental to the discussion, the reply button is for when you disagree with me :)

seconded

What I do not understand is why (so it feels) recently, a lot of disagreement is done via the downvote, if someone actually just rationally states his/her opinion.

So back to topic...

[uxp]

If this actually fixes a legitimate problem (which is what?), I don't think anyone thinks that it shouldn't be fixed, just not at a x.12 release.

This changes breaks rgrep, thus it should be held until a full version (3.0).

edit: my FreeBSD's `grep` manpage:

    -R, -r, --recursive
           Read all files under each directory, recursively; this is equiv-
           alent to the -d recurse option.

[tinco]

I think many people think it should not be fixed, even though it has a use case which is mentioned elsewhere in the comments.

I absolutely agree than any changes to interface like this should be in clearly defined milestone releases, possibly allowing patches to be backported to legacy versions.

[koenigdavidmj]

FreeBSD grep is just GNU grep, it appears, up to but not including 9.0. Note the long --recursive option in the manual page snippet that you posted; no properly God-fearing BSD program would support long options.

[jasomill]

The new non-GNU grep in FreeBSD 9 was designed to be compatible with GNU grep (pedantically, with GNU grep configured with --disable-perl-regexp as it has been in previous FreeBSD releases) because lots of ports depend on GNU grep behavior. The fear of God is not a sufficient reason to break ports.

[warmfuzzykitten]

I disagree. This is not a "fix" it's an incompatible change to a widely used option for no better reason than a programmer thought the different behavior would be a useful addition to grep.

And yes, we have to continue with an ugly bikeshed for the rest of eternity, because a) beauty is highly subjective, and b) the color of the bikeshed is less important than breaking existing software on billions of computers worldwide.

[cturner]

You'll feel differently when you inherit responsibility for some god-awful mess of shell and perl that nobody properly understands that used to Just Work but doesn't after an innocent upgrade.

[droithomme]

Grep is used in hundreds of millions of scripts ranging from mundane rarely used things to install scripts to critical system functionality run every few minutes.

It's not acceptable to break the default way it works under any circumstances.

[jasomill]

I agree in principle, though to be fair most UNIX utilities have so many incompatible variants that striving for maximum backwards compatibility often does more harm than good (like producing options that do entirely different things in the presence of other options, in the absence of a leading hyphen, etc.). Practically speaking, sysadmins generally use more consistent tools (e.g., Perl) for nontrivial cross-OS things once this becomes an issue, and, as a developer, it's not clear to me that build-time dependence on, say, Perl or Python is any worse than depending on GNU versions of basic UNIX tools, the existence of which tends to only be a safe assumption on Linux. On non-UNIX platforms, this is an even bigger issue: I'd certainly rather recommend ActivePerl or the latest binary Python 2.7.x release from python.org to the average Windows developer than any of SFU, Cygwin, or MSYS (and I say this as someone with a strong UNIX background who works with both Windows and Windows developers on a daily basis).

[guard-of-terra]

grep doesn't need any more evolution. grep is the final result of the evolution.