Re: [AD] Keeping non modified properties when grabbing

[Peter Wang <tjaden@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2002-05-21, Evert Glebbeek <eglebbk@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > > I might have partially turned my mind about this feature in
> > > light of the
> > > recent thread dubbed "Grabber Patch" on [AD]. Wouldn't it be nice to
> > > turn it on by default when *updating* a datafile ?
> >
> > That could be confusing to have two different default behaviors
> > for dat and grabber, for essentially the same action. But anyway,
> > it should be an option, probably off by default just for the sake
> > of backwardc ompatibility.
> 
> Couldn't the dat utility be changed at the same time?
> I'd really like an option such as this to be on by default.

I concur, because..

> What would get 
> broken if a property that was stripped before isn't stripped now?

.. that's how I see it, too.

> Perhaps add a new grabber command line switch, -bc, that starts the 
> grabber in compatibility mode and disables all the nice new things we 
> otherwise couldn't normally make default because of backward compatibility?

Backwards compatibility of utilities isn't all that important.  As
long as the options are there, I feel it's good enough.  (Hey, at
least we don't maintain GNU tar and keep changing the bzip2 option ;-)