[TUHS] Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix philosophy' The Register

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, Jun 16, 2024, 7:25 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 17, 2024 at 11:01:40AM +1000, Alexis wrote:
> > "Greg A. Woods" <woods at robohack.ca> writes:
> >
> > >At Sun, 16 Jun 2024 15:48:15 +1000, Alexis <flexibeast at gmail.com>
> > >wrote:
> > >Subject: [TUHS] Re: Version 256 of systemd boasts '42% less Unix
> > >philosophy' The Register
> > >>
> > >>Here's an excerpt from something i wrote
> > >>on the Gentoo forum back in April:
> > >>
> > >>> [[...]] the situation on
> > >>> Linux was a mess. Many of the (usually
> > >>> volunteers) who maintain packages for
> > >>> Linux don't want to have to learn the
> > >>> complexities of shell scripting and the
> > >>> subtle issues that can arise
> > >
> > >That pretty much says it all about the state of the GNU/linux world
> > >right there.
> > >
> > >In the "Unix world" everyone learns shell scripting, some better than
> > >others of course, and some hate it at the same time too, but I would
> > >say
> > >from my experience it's a given.  You either learn shell scripting or
> > >you are "just a user" (even if you also write application code).
> >
> > i feel this comment is unfair.
> >
> > The specific thing i wrote was:
> >
> > >the _complexities_ of shell scripting and the _subtle issues_ that can
> > >arise
> >
> > [emphasis added]
> >
> > The issue isn't about learning shell scripting _per se_. It's about the
> > extent to which _volunteers_ have to go beyond the _basics_ of shell
> > scripting to learn about the _complexities_ and _subtle issues_ involved
> in
> > using it to provide _robust_ service management. Including learning, for
> > example, that certain functionality one takes for granted in a given
> shell
> > isn't actually POSIX, and can't be assumed to be present in the shell
> one is
> > working with (not to mention that POSIX-compatibility might need to be
> > actively enabled, as in the case of e.g. ksh, via POSIXLY_CORRECT).
>
> This is sort of off topic but maybe relevant.
>
> When I was running my company, my engineers joked that if it were invented
> after 1980 I wouldn't let them use it.  Which wasn't true, we used mmap().
>
> But the underlying sentiment sort of was true.  Even though they were
> all used to bash, I tried very hard to not use bash specific stuff.
> And it paid off, in our hey day, we supported SCO, AIX, HPUX, SunOS,
> Solaris, Tru64, Linux on every architecture from tin to IBM mainframes,
> Windows, Macos on PPC and x86, etc.  And probably a bunch of other
> platforms I've forgotten.
>
> *Every* time they used some bash-ism, it bit us in the ass.  I kept
> telling them "our build environment is not our deployment environment".
> We had a bunch of /bin/sh stuff that we shipped so we had to go for
> the common denominator.
>

The fallout of the Unix Wars was that this denominator was kept too low for
too long.

Warner

I did relax things to allow GNU Make, there were some features that they
> really wanted and that is build environment, so, shrug.
>
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