[TUHS] Were all of you.. Hippies?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 01:18:35AM +0100, Josh Good wrote:
> On 2017 Mar 23, 20:51, ron minnich wrote:
> > My belief is that if a kernel requires something like lspci to enumerate
> > pci resources then it's forgotten an important lesson of Unix.
> 
> Could you elaborate?
> 
> I think the kernel does not need lspci to enumerate PCI resources,
> instead that command makes the kernel output to the console its internal
> enumeration of the PCI resources.

I think Ron is just in Grumpy Old Man mode (he's a friend, we go way back,
so I get to say that :)

Personally, I sort of get the ls<something> model.  ls is how you list 
things, <something> is how you say what you want to list.  Is it Unix
like?  Hmm, perhaps not.  Is it useful?  Like a lot of stuff that Linux
did, hell yes it's useful.  I've written perl scripts to paw through
/proc and /sys to do the same thing and each time I've found a ls<xxx>
that does what I want I have gleefully tossed my script.

Linux is weird.  It's not elegant like the early unix systems, it's 
not as well put together if you look at it through unix glasses (and
don't get me started on plan 9 glasses).  But it is *useful*.  They 
favored useful over elegant.  I don't think they disliked elegant,
I suspect that many of us would say they didn't have the good taste
to do elegant, whatever.  It's useful.  I'll take that.  And it's
really not that bad.  Unless you are grumpy and want a perfect world.