useNoSSLForPackages and other badly-conceived options (notice non-hijacked thread!)

[Paul Gear]

Adrian Likins wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 04:39:52PM +1000, Paul Gear wrote:
> 
>>As the subject says, i think 'useNoSSLForPackages' is rather badly
>>conceived.  Whenever i see an option that has the word "No" or "Don't"
>>in it, alarm bells ring in my head.
>>
> 
> 	heh, yeah. I think it was supposed to be "useNoSSLServerURLForPackages".
> But then, I've never been one for picking good names for things. 

That's not the point: what i'm asking for is that all options should be
stated in the positive, not the negative.  If you want to use SSL by
default (which i think you shouldn't, but that doesn't matter for the
purposes of this discussion), you should make an option called
'useSSLForPackages' and set it to 1.  Don't call it
'useNoSSLForPackages' and set it to 0 - that means that people have to
negate it in their head.  The same goes for:

noBootLoader=0    (should be BootLoader=1)

noReboot=0        (should be Reboot=1, or perhaps 'RebootIfNecessary',
since just reboot by itself might give the impression that reboots are
*always* done)

noReplaceConfig=0 (should be ReplaceConfig=1)

> ...
> 	As mentioned, it was origianally added to up2date to allow
> people to setup squid caches (with a suitable tweaked squid config to
> cache big "objects"...)

That's exactly why i'm asking for SSL to be off by default.  It serves
no purpose (now that the GPG signature verification bug is fixed), and
it makes things behave in an unexpected manner when sending the
connection through a proxy.
-- 
Paul
http://paulgear.webhop.net

A: Because we read from top to bottom, left to right.
Q: Why should i start my reply below the quoted text?
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