On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 1:07 AM Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@lemis.com> wrote: On Tuesday, 28 August 2018 at 23:23:10 -0400, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 11:06:05AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
....
Creeping featurism!
No, I think its really is that many programmers that touch different applications felt the need to pee on the code to feel that they left their scent. 😘
Seriously, IMO the problem is you can never know what someone else really values, so be careful at what you change. Pike's 'cat -v' dissertation b*tched at UCB for the some of the same issues. Somewhere there is a proper middle ground ( I think of as having good taste elegance). BSD nor Linux was no more 'perfect' that 6th or 7th edition. Truth is a much as I pine for the elegance, I don't want to run either of the later as my day-2-day system in today's world and I >>loved<< running them when they were what I had.
Rob has a real point and many of the changes really are gratuitous and there are better ways of doing many things than adding a switch to old command and reusing it because you can. I also think the complaint of just adding 'crap' because you could started with BSD but the cause wasn't that people were bad -- there was address space relief over the PDP-11 and often added a new switch/new functionality was easy to do, instead of creating a whole new solution just deidcated to that problen only. FWIW: sendmail is my best example (useful tool that it was - there were/are much more elegant solutions - sendmail should have been 'headerwriter' and smtpd should have been a seperate program).
Dueling switches and functionality (dec vs -f bs -F) I fear is sometimes ignorance of the past. I fear there is some sort of belief we need to shed the past because someone feeld the it gets in the way of the future (I'll pick on my on son here - who things 2-3 years is 'old' and its time to throw things away). Truth is sometimes it might. But I would rather inject a stronger strain into the mix and let the users decide and for good or bad, BSD did that to the original (v6/v7) and now Linux is doing/has done it to much of BSD.
The compaint is the 'throwing the baby out with the bath water' behavior that seems to often follow (see systemd issues on other mailing lists); i.e. did you really gain something for this huge disruption. To me when something really new/a great innovation comes that should be celebrated.
BSD gave us VM and a number of 'useful' new utilities, and eventually an networking API (al biet not everyone liked it, sockets was good enough, solved the problems and became a standard that allowed us to move on). Mach (while Larry may not like the VM implementation), moved the bar for the kernel's handling of memory a huge amount and almost won the uK war (which IMO was a too bad). BTW: other kernels would do nice VM's too, but Mach was generally available (open source if you will and really was the system the moived it forward).
That said, I give the Linux folks great credit for the addition of modules was huge and it took BSD and the other UNIX systems a few years really pick up that idea in the same way (yes Solaris, Tru64 and eventually HPUX etc.. had something too but again - my comment about being generally available applies).
So here is the issue, how to do move the ball forward? BSD, then Linux, became the 'stronger strain' and pushed out the old version. The problem is the ROMs in my fingers (like Dave) never got reprogrammed so some of the 'new' becomes annoying. Will I learned to like systemd? We shall see...
Clem