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

[Marcus Brinkmann]

On Sat, May 18, 2002 at 03:38:49PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> which order should the author, owner, and group be listed?

I think that as most people read terminal output from left to right, and
they are used to seeing first the owner, than the group.  tolerating a
another user name after that is easier to tolerate than to change the order
completely.  I think only user:group:author or author:user:group are
acceptable, and I think I would go for user:group:author.

> A similar issue arises with the chown command, e.g.,

Again, I would go for user:group:author.
It would be entirely non-intuitive if it would be user:group in the
two-components form but something else in the three component form.

> 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.

It is true that both are uids, but the author of the file is not the owner,
and has no relationship to the owner.

>   In practice, how common is it in the Hurd for the author to differ
>   from the owner?

As far as I know, the desired behaviour is for cp to retain the author
field.  This means that if you cp a file you are not an author of, the new
file would have your uid as owner and the original file's author's uid
as author.

Another tidbit of information is that the author field is not used verify
file access permissions.

>   Perhaps if I understood this, I would see why it makes sense to put
>   the info in a particular order.

I hope I was of help.  Maybe Thomas can fill in any missing details about
the author field. 

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
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