Re: preferred order of owner, group, author in GNU/Hurd ls -l output?

[Victor Pelt]

to me it makes sence to do the owner:group:author format
since the owner is the most important person, he owns the file
after that i think the groups comes in terms of inportance
especially since there 2 also are used in the file permission
field. the autor should come last since it is extra info like 
the creation/moddification time of the file

Victor Pelt

Quoting Paul Eggert <eggert@twinsun.com>:

> Alfred M. Szmidt (ams) contributed a patch to the GNU file utilities
> to cause 'ls --author -l' to output a file's author as well as its
> owner and group.  While reviewing that patch, the topic came up: which
> order should the author, owner, and group be listed?
> 
> For example, suppose a file 'foo' is owned by 'eggert', has author
> 'ams', and group 'staff'.  Here are some plausible outputs for the
> command 'ls --author -l foo':
> 
>   -rw-rw-r--    1 eggert   staff    ams         15460 May 18 15:28 foo
>   -rw-rw-r--    1 eggert   ams      staff       15460 May 18 15:28 foo
>   -rw-rw-r--    1 ams      eggert   staff       15460 May 18 15:28 foo
> 
> Which of these outputs is preferable and why?
> 
> A similar issue arises with the chown command, e.g.,
> which of the following should set the author to 'ams'?
> 
>   chown eggert:staff:ams foo
>   chown eggert:ams:staff foo
>   chown ams:eggert:staff foo
> 
> Presumably the chown-command order should be the same as the ls order.
> 
> In earlier private discussion on this topic, I made this point:
> 
>   The owner and author are uids whereas the group is a gid, and it
>   seems to me that the uids should be kept together in the listing.
> 
> ams replied:
> 
>   Actually, wouldn't it be easier and more compatible to have it in
>   the [owner:group:author] order?  If you specify an empty author
>   field (owner::group) that becomes quite weird instead of using
>   something along the lines of "owner:group" where one can quietly
>   discard the author field.  You also change the group more often than
>   the author of a file, which is only changed once, when the file is
>   created.
> 
> I also asked:
> 
>   In practice, how common is it in the Hurd for the author to differ
>   from the owner?  What are typical situations where this occurs?
>   Perhaps if I understood this, I would see why it makes sense to put
>   the info in a particular order.
> 
> And ams replied:
> 
>   No idea, as this feature hasn't been implemented yet it hasn't been
>   used.  To be frank, I don't understand what use this field has, why
>   not just put a "Written by:" tag at the top of the source
>   code/document/whatever. Which one can then later view with `head'.
>   The only time I can think that it has any real use is for binary
>   files, like who compiled a specific binary.  You will have to ask
>   Thomas Bushnell about this.
> 
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