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
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.
>>
>>
>>
>
(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
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.
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
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.
-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?
-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 $15,000 per article, and for a very
reasonable price.... They were happy to sign up once they were made aware
that just because something is available on the Internet doesn't mean you
can republish it on your site.
GPL (or similar "virally"
> licensed) software carries legal implications for anyone selling or
> distributing products that contain such software; and this can be a
> motivation to use software with less-restrictive license terms.
Only to the victims of FUD. Reusing source code is one thing: repackaging
programs is another.
I'll say no more about this here.
MacOS finally pushed me to zsh. So I went all the way and installed
oh-my-zsh. It makes me feel very dirty, and I have a two-line prompt (!!),
but I can't deny it's convenient.
tickets/DM-32983 ✗
adam@m1-wired:~/git/jenkins-dm-jobs$
(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
>
