[TUHS] Abstractions

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Jon Steinhart wrote in
 <202102151956.11FJuRIh3079869 at darkstar.fourwinds.com>:
 |Was thinking about our recent discussion about system call bloat and such.
 |Seemed to me that there was some argument that it was needed in order to
 |support modern needs.  As I tried to say, I think that a good part of the
 |bloat stemmed from we-need-to-add-this-to-support-that thinking instead
 |of what's-the-best-way-to-extend-the-system-to-support-this-need thinking.
 |
 |So if y'all are up for it, I'd like to have a discussion on what abstrac\
 |tions
 |would be appropriate in order to meet modern needs.  Any takers?

Proper program exit integer status codes.
Now that "set -o pipefail" is a standardized feature of POSIX
shells all that is needed are programs which properly handle
errors and also report that to the outside.  This is very hard,
especially when put over existing codebases.

But also new code.  For example i use BTRFS (with a long term
perspective to switch to ZFS, because of restartable snapshot
sends, and also because of ZFS encrypted partitions to replace my
several encfs-encrypted on-demand storages, these now can even be
shared in between FreeBSD and Linux), (i use it at all because it
ships with the Linux kernel, can be compiled-in, is
copyright-compatible, that is i wanted to test that coming from
over two decades of ext2/3/4 on Linux and of course the default of
FreeBSD, and i really drive the entire thing with subvolumes, only
the EFI boot partition is truly separate), anyhow, receiving
snapshots can fail but the snapshot counts as having been properly
received, and no exit status whatsoever will report the failure.
(At least in my practical experiences.)
Easy scriptability with proper (also meaning automatically
interpretable) error reports.

--steffen
|
|Der Kragenbaer,                The moon bear,
|der holt sich munter           he cheerfully and one by one
|einen nach dem anderen runter  wa.ks himself off
|(By Robert Gernhardt)