Re: [TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view

On Sat, Jul 03, 2021 at 09:20:57AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote: I agree with most of what you assess as "good" and "bad" with systemd. However... To be fair, systemd isn't the first. BSD's sar program uses a binary log file. I'm not sure whether it's BSD's fault or only after it was pulled into the systat package for Linux, but the binary format for the sar file is (a) not self-describing, (b) not backwards compatible, and (c) not stable between different versions, such that if you copy /var/log/sa/saNN the files from one system and try to interpret it on another system, you need to make sure that other system has the same version of sar installed. This can be a headache if you are trying to debug an enterprise system which is using a seven-year-old version of RHEL, and your laptop is running something a bit more modern. Things like Ingres also came out of Berkely, and modern databases all use binary format files. Is anything running a database, whether it be Ingress, Postgres, Oracle Enterprise Database, DB2, no longer "Unix"? And then there's AIX, which uses binary config files which are manipulated using "smit", and mixes per-machine specific configs with more general configs, all in a single config (or should I say, "registry") file, so $DEITY help you if you try to copy the smit database from one system to another if you are trying to do some kind of large scale administration setup. And granted there are many people would dispute whether AIX is actually "Unix", it technically speaking qualified to use the "Unix"(tm) trademark. Similarly, Digital Equipment Corpartion's Ultrix used a binary log file which you had to transmogrify using the uerf ("Ultrix Error Report Formatter"). Like systemd, Ultrix uses a structured logging so you can pull out specific types of logs, and Ultrix's uerf works much systemd's journalctl. So the concept of using binary logs and binary files predates systemd, and there are more than a few examples that can be found in historical systems that most people would have no trouble calling "Unix", and even qualify for the Unix(tm) trademark. - Ted P.S. For the most part, Linux systems don't qualify for the Unix(tm) trademark, although it's not clear most people care about that these days. (A long time ago distributions paid $$$ to Posix Compliance labs, probably because the government procurement requirements required Unix(tm) systems, much like OSI stacks were simlarly required by government procurement requirements.)