December 2021 - COFF - www.tuhs.org

on progress -- was [TUHS] moving directories in svr2

by Clem Cole

Moving to COFF since while this is a UNIX issue its really attitude, experience and perspective. On Thu, Dec 30, 2021 at 8:01 PM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Grumpy hat on. > > Sometimes the Unix community suffers from the twin attitudes of a) > believing if it can't be done perfectly, any improvement shouldn't be > attempted at all and b) it's already done as well as is possible anyway. > > I disagree with both of these positions, obviously, but have given up > pushing against them. > > We're in the 6th decade of Unix and we still suffer from unintended, > fixable consequences of decisions made long long ago. > > Grumpy hat off. > > -rob > While I often agree with you and am a huge fan of your work both written and programming, I am going to take a different position: I am very much into researching different solutions and love exploring them and seeing how to apply the lessons, but *just because we can change a change*, *does not always mean we should*. IMOI: *Economics has to play into equation*. I offer the IPv4 to IPv6 fiasco as an example of a change because we could (and we thought it would help - hey I did in the early 1990s), but it failed for economic reasons. In the end, any real change has to take into account some level of economics. The examples of the differences in the shell is actually a different issue -- that was territorial and not economics -- each vendor adding stuff that helped them (and drove IVS/end users of multiple platforms crazy). The reality with SunOS sh vs Ultrix sh vs HP-UX sh vs System V (att sh) was yet another similar but different -- every manufacturer messed with a V7 derivative sh was a little different -- including AT&T, Korn et al. For that matter you (Rob) created a new syntax command with Plan9 [although you did not try to be and never claimed to be V7 compatible -- to your point you break things where you thought it matters and as a researcher I accept that]. But because all the manufacturers were a little different, it was exactly why IEEE said -- wait a minute -- let's define a base syntax which will work everywhere and it is something we can all agree and if we all support it -- great. We did that, and we call that POSIX (and because it was designed by compromise and committee - like a camel it has some humps). *But that does mean compromise -- some agreed 'sh' basics needs to keep the base level.* The problem Ted and Larry describes is real ... research *vs.* production. So it begs the question, at what time does it make it sensible/ (worth it/economically viable) to move on? Apple famously breaks things and it drives me bonkers because many (most I would suggest) of those changes are hardly worth it -- be it my iPhone or my Mac. I just want to use the darned thing BTW: Last week, the clowns at Telsa just rolled out a new UI for my Model S --- ugh -- because they could (now I'm fumbling trying deal with the climate system or the radio -- it would not do bad if they had rolled out a the new UI on a simulator for my iPad so I could at least get used to it -- but I'm having to learn it live -- what a PITA -- that really makes me grumpy). What I ask for this august body to consider is that before we start looking at these changes is to ask what we are really getting in return when a new implementation breaks something that worked before. *e.g.* I did not think systemd bought end users much value able, must like IPv6 in practice, it was thought to solve many problems, but did not buy that much and has caused (continues to cause) many more. In biolog every so often we have an "ice age" and kill a few things off and get to start over. That rarely happens in technology, except when a real Christianen style disruption takes place -- which is based on economics -- a new market values the new idea and the old market dies off. I believe that from the batch/mainframe 1960s/early 70s world, Unix was just that -- but we got to start over because the economics of 'open systems' and the >>IP<< being 'freely available' [which compared to VMS and other really proprietary systems] did kill them off. I also think that the economics of completely free (Linux) ended up killing the custom Unix diversions. Frankly, if (at the beginning) Plan9 has been a tad easier/cheaper/more economical for >>everyone<< in the community obtain (unlike original Unix release time, Plan9 was not the same rules because AT&T was under different rules and HW cost rules had changed things), it >>might<< have been the strong strain that killed off the old. If IPv6 has been (in practice) cheaper to use than IPv4 [which is what I personally thought the ISP would do with it - since it had been designed to help them] and not made as a premium feature (i.e they had made it economically to change), it might have killed of IPv4. Look at 7 decades of Programming Language design, just being 'better' is not good enough. As I have said here and many other places, the reality is that Fortran still pays the salary of people like me in the HPC area [and I don't see Julia or for that matter, my own company's pretty flower - Data Parallel C++ making inroads soon]. It's possible that Rust as a system programming language >>might<< prove economical to replace C. I personally hope Go makes the inroads to replace C++ in user space. But for either to do that, there has to be an economical reason - no brainer style for management. What got us here was a discussion of the original implementation of directory files, WRT links and how paths are traversed. The basic argument comes from issues with how and when objects are named. Rob, I agree with you, that just because UNIX (or any other system) used a scheme previously does not make the end-all. And I do believe that rethinking some of the choices made 5-6 decades ago is in order. But I ask the analysis of the new verse the old takes into account, how to mitigate the damage done. If its economics prove valuable, the evolution to using it will allow a stronger strain to take over, but just because something new vs. the old, does not make it valuable. Respectfully .... Happy new year everyone and hopefully 2022 proves a positive time for all of you. Clem

3 years, 3 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] moving directories in svr2

by Adam Thornton

Moving to COFF, perhaps prematurely, but... It feels weird to be a Unix native (which I consider myself: got my first taste of Irix and SVR3 in 1989, went to college where it was a Sun-mostly environment, started running Linux on my own machines in 1992 and never stopped). (For purposes of this discussion, of course Linux is Unix.) It feels weird the same way it was weird when I was working for Express Scripts, and then ESRX bought Medco, and all of a sudden we were the 500-lb Gorilla. That's why I left: we (particularly my little group) had been doing some fairly cool and innovative stuff, and after that deal closed, we switched over entirely to playing defense, and it got really boring really fast. My biggest win after that was showing that Pega ran perfectly fine on Tomcat, which caused IBM to say something like "oh did we say $5 million a year to license Websphere App Server? Uh...we meant $50K." So I saved them a lot of money but it sucked to watch several months' work flushed down the toilet, even though the savings to the company was many times my salary for those months. But the weird part is similar: Unix won. Windows *lost*. Sure, corporate desktops still mostly run Windows, and those people who use it mostly hate it. But people who like using computers...use Macs (or, sure, Linux, and then there are those weirdos like me who enjoy running all sorts of ancient-or-niche-systems, many of which are Unix). And all the people who don't care do computing tasks on their phones, which are running either Android--a Unix--or iOS--also a Unix. It's ubiquitous. It's the air you breathe. It's no longer strange to be a Unix user, it means you use a 21st-century electronic device. And, sure, it's got its warts, but it's still basically the least-worst thing out there. And it continues to flabbergast me that a typesetting system designed to run on single-processor 16-bit machines has, basically, conquered the world. Adam P.S. It's also about time, he said with a sigh of relief, having been an OS/2 partisan, and a BeOS partisan, back in the day. Nice to back a winning horse for once. On Thu, Dec 30, 2021 at 6:46 PM Bakul Shah <bakul(a)iitbombay.org> wrote: > ? > > I was just explaining Ts'o's point, not agreeing with it. The first > example I > gave works just fine on plan9 (unlike on unix). And since it doesn't allow > renames, the scenario T'so outlines can't happen there! But we were > discussing Unix here. > > As for symlinks, if we have to have them, storing a path actually makes > their > use less surprising. > > We're in the 6th decade of Unix and we still suffer from unintended, > fixable consequences of decisions made long long ago. > > > No argument here. Perhaps you can suggest a path for fixing? > > On Dec 30, 2021, at 5:00 PM, Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Grumpy hat on. > > Sometimes the Unix community suffers from the twin attitudes of a) > believing if it can't be done perfectly, any improvement shouldn't be > attempted at all and b) it's already done as well as is possible anyway. > > I disagree with both of these positions, obviously, but have given up > pushing against them. > > We're in the 6th decade of Unix and we still suffer from unintended, > fixable consequences of decisions made long long ago. > > Grumpy hat off. > > -rob > > > On Fri, Dec 31, 2021 at 11:44 AM Bakul Shah <bakul(a)iitbombay.org> wrote: > >> On Dec 30, 2021, at 2:31 PM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> > >> > On Thu, Dec 30, 2021 at 11:41 AM Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote: >> >> >> >> The other problem with storing the path as a string is that if >> >> higher-level directories get renamed, the path would become >> >> invalidated. If you store the cwd as "/foo/bar/baz/quux", and someone >> >> renames "/foo/bar" to "/foo/sadness" the cwd-stored-as-a-string would >> >> become invalidated. >> > >> > Why? Presumably as you traversed the filesystem, you'd cache, (path >> > component, inode) pairs and keep a ref on the inode. For any given >> > file, including $CWD, you'd know it's pathname from the root as you >> > accessed it, but if it got renamed, it wouldn't matter because you'd >> > have cached a reference to the inode. >> >> Without the ".." entry you can't map a dir inode back to a path. >> Note that something similar can happen even today: >> >> $ mkdir ~/a; cd ~/a; rm -rf ~/a; cd .. >> cd: no such file or directory: .. >> >> $ mkdir -p ~/a/b; ln -s ~/a/b b; cd b; mv ~/a/b ~/a/c; cd ../b >> ls: ../b: No such file or directory >> >> You can't protect the user from every such case. Storing a path >> instead of the cwd inode simply changes the symptoms. >> >> >> >

3 years, 3 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Photos of University Computer Labs - now off topic

by Theodore Ts'o

(Moving to COFF, tuhs on bcc.) On Tue, Dec 28, 2021 at 01:45:14PM -0800, Greg A. Woods wrote: > > There have been patches proposed, but it turns out the sticky wicket > > is that we're out of signal numbers on most architectures. > > Huh. What an interesting "excuse"! (Not that I know anything useful > about the implementation in Linux....) If recall correctly, the last time someone tried to submit patches, they overloaded some signal that was in use, and it was NACK'ed on that basis. I personally didn't care, because on my systems, I'll use GUI program like xload, or if I need something more detailed, GKrellM. (And GKreelM can be used to remotely monitor servers as well.) > > SIGLOST - Term File lock lost (unused) > > SIGSTKFLT - Term Stack fault on coprocessor (unused) > > If SIGLOST were used/needed it would seem like a very bad system design. It's used in Solaris to report that the client NFSv4 code could not recover a file lock on recovery. So that means one of the first places to look would be to see if Ganesha (an open-source NFSv4 user-space client) isn't using SIGLOST (or might have plans to use SIGLOST in the feature). For a remote / distributed file system, Brewer's Theorem applies --- Consistency, Availability, Partition tolerance --- chose any two, but you're not always going to be able to get all three. Cheers, - Ted

3 years, 3 months

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Re: [COFF] What is your prompt?

by Rudi Blom

On my Windows 11 notebook with WSL2 + Linux I got as default rubl@DESKTOP-NQR082T:~$ echo $PS1 \[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\[\033[01;32m\]\u@ \h\[\033[00m\]:\[\033[01;34m\]\w\[\033[00m\]\$ rubl@DESKTOP-NQR082T:~$ uname -a Linux DESKTOP-NQR082T 5.10.74.3-microsoft-standard-WSL2+ #4 SMP Sun Dec 19 16:25:10 +07 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux rubl@DESKTOP-NQR082T:~$ -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing.

3 years, 3 months

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What is your prompt? (was: ksh88 source code?)

by Andy Kosela

On 12/22/21, Adam Thornton <athornton(a)gmail.com> wrote: > MacOS finally pushed me to zsh. So I went all the way and installed > oh-my-zsh. It makes me feel very dirty, and I have a two-line prompt (!!), > but I can't deny it's convenient. > > tickets/DM-32983 ✗ > adam@m1-wired:~/git/jenkins-dm-jobs$ > > (and in my terminal, the X glyph next to my git branch showing the status > is dirty is red while the branch name is green) > > and if something doesn't exit with rc=0... > > adam@m1-wired:~/git/jenkins-dm-jobs$ fart > zsh: command not found: fart > tickets/DM-32983 ✗127 ⚠️ > adam@m1-wired:~/git/jenkins-dm-jobs$ > > Then I also get the little warning glyph and the rc of the last command in > my prompt. > > But then I'm also now using Fira Code with ligatures in my terminal, so > I've pretty much gone full Red Lightsaber. I try to keep my prompt as simple as possible. For years I have been using: moon $ That 's it. No fancy colors, not even displaying current working directory. I have an alias 'p' for that. --Andy

3 years, 3 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] ksh88 source code?

by Rudi Blom

Still using ksh on HP-UX 11.31 on an rx2660 Itanium based server :-) -- The more I learn the better I understand I know nothing.

3 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS -> COFF] Photos of University Computer Labs - now off topic

by Nemo Nusquam

On 2021-12-23 11:00, Larry McVoy wrote: > On Thu, Dec 23, 2021 at 03:29:18PM +0000, Dr Iain Maoileoin wrote: >>> Probably boomer doing math wrong. >> I might get flamed for this comment, but is a number divided by a number not >> arithmetic.?? I cant see any maths in there. > That's just a language thing, lots of people in the US call arithmetic > math. I'm 100% positive that that is not just me. Classes in elementary grades are called "math classes" (but then there is Serre's book). N.

3 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] Photos of University Computer Labs - now off topic

by John Cowan

-tuhs +coff On Thu, Dec 23, 2021 at 11:47 AM Dr Iain Maoileoin < iain(a)csp-partnership.co.uk> wrote: I totally agree. My question is about language use (or drift) - nothing > else. In Scotland - amongst the young - "Arithmetic" is now referred > to as "Maths". I am aware of the transition but cant understand what > caused it to happen! I dont know if other countries had/have the same > slide from a specific to a general - hence the questions - nothing deeper. > Language change is inexplicable in general. About all we know is that some directions of change are more likely than others: we no more know *why* language changes than we know *why* the laws of physics are what they are. Both widening (_dog_ once meant 'mastiff') and narrowing (_deer_ once meant 'animal') are among the commonest forms of semantic change. In particular, in the 19C _arithmetic_ meant 'number theory', and so the part concerned with the computation of "ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision" (Lewis Carroll) was _elementary arithmetic_. (Before that it was _algorism_.) When _higher arithmetic_ got its own name, the _elementary_ part was dropped in accordance with Grice's Maxim of Quantity ("be as informative as you can, giving as much information as necessary, but no more"). This did not happen to _algebra_, which still can mean either elementary or abstract algebra, still less to _geometry_. In addition, from the teacher's viewpoint school mathematics is a continuum, including the elementary parts of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and in recent times probability theory and statistics, for which there is no name other than _ mathematics_ when taken collectively. > In lower secondary school we would go to both Arithmetic AND also to > Maths classes. > What was taught in the latter?

3 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] ksh88 source code?

by John Cowan

-tuhs +coff On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 1:30 AM <jason-tuhs(a)shalott.net> wrote: > As a vendor or distributor, you would care. Anyone doing an OS or other > software distribution (think the BSDs, of course; There is no legal reason why the BSDs can't distribute GPLed software; indeed, they did so for many years. Their objection is purely ideological. > but also think Apple or > Microsoft) needs to care. Apple and Microsoft can buy up, outspend, out-lawyer, or just outwait anyone suing them for infringement. Their only reasons for not doing so are reputational. > Anyone selling a hardware device with embedded > software (think switches/routers; think IOT devices; think consumer > devices like DVRs; etc) needs to care. Only if they are determined to infringe. Obeying the GPL's rules (most often for BusyBox) is straightforward, and the vast majority of infringers (per the FSF's legal team) are not aware that they have done anything wrong and are willing to comply once notified, which cures the defect (much less of a penalty than for most infringements). The ex-infringers do not seem to consider this a serious competitive disadvantage. GPL licensors are generous sharers, but you have to be willing to share yourself. I saw this dynamic in action while working for Reuters; we were licensing our health-related news to websites, and I would occasionally google for fragments of our articles. When I found one on a site I didn't recognize, I'd pass the website to Sales, who would sweetly point out that infringement could cost them up to $15,000 per article, and for a very reasonable price.... They were happy to sign up once they were made aware that just because something is available on the Internet doesn't mean you can republish it on your site. GPL (or similar "virally" > licensed) software carries legal implications for anyone selling or > distributing products that contain such software; and this can be a > motivation to use software with less-restrictive license terms. Only to the victims of FUD. Reusing source code is one thing: repackaging programs is another. I'll say no more about this here.

3 years, 4 months

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Re: [COFF] [TUHS] ksh88 source code?

by Adam Thornton

MacOS finally pushed me to zsh. So I went all the way and installed oh-my-zsh. It makes me feel very dirty, and I have a two-line prompt (!!), but I can't deny it's convenient. tickets/DM-32983 ✗ adam@m1-wired:~/git/jenkins-dm-jobs$ (and in my terminal, the X glyph next to my git branch showing the status is dirty is red while the branch name is green) and if something doesn't exit with rc=0... adam@m1-wired:~/git/jenkins-dm-jobs$ fart zsh: command not found: fart tickets/DM-32983 ✗127 ⚠️ adam@m1-wired:~/git/jenkins-dm-jobs$ Then I also get the little warning glyph and the rc of the last command in my prompt. But then I'm also now using Fira Code with ligatures in my terminal, so I've pretty much gone full Red Lightsaber. Adam On Wed, Dec 22, 2021 at 7:41 AM Norman Wilson <norman(a)oclsc.org> wrote: > Thomas Paulsen: > > bash is clearly more advanced. ksh is retro computing. > > ==== > > Shell wars are, in the end, no more interesting than editor wars. > > I use bash on Linux systems because it's the least-poorly > supported of the Bourne-family shells, besides which bash > is there by default. Ksh isn't. > > I use ksh on OpenBSD systems because it's the least-poorly > supported of the Bourne-family shells, besides which kh > is there by default. Bash isn't. > > I don't actually care for most of the extra crap in either > of those shells. I don't want my shell to do line editing > or auto-completion, and I find the csh-derived history > mechanisms more annoying than useful so I turn them off > too. To my mind, the Research 10/e sh had it about right, > including the simple way functions were exported and the > whatis built-in that told you whether something was a > variable or a shell function or an external executable, > and printed the first two in forms easily edited on the > screen and re-used. > > Terminal programs that don't let you easily edit input > or output from the screen and re-send it, and programs > that abet them by spouting gratuitous ANSI control > sequences: now THAT's what I call retro-computing. > > Probably further discussion of any of this belongs in > COFF. > > Norman Wilson > Toronto ON >

3 years, 4 months

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COFF December 2021