20 Apr
2018
20 Apr
'18
8:59 p.m.
On 20 Apr 2018, at 01:56, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
Ah, soothing classical Unix Musik, so rare in the cacophonous Linux era.
The problem is that 'rarely used options of limited usefulness' can mean two
things: options which no-one finds useful and options which only a small number of people
find very useful. It is Not Funny when people decide to remove some option which not many
people used but on which some critical bit of software you rely on turns out to depend.
I think the canonical example of that in my experience was echo -n and certain shell
scripts which may or may not have edited passwd files, in the transition from BSDoid SunOS
to SYSVoid SunOS. I remember that being very much not funny.
(Note I don't want to start a big argument about this, I just think it's a bit
more nuanced than the minimalists sometimes think.)