From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <46522B50.7060008@conducive.org> Date: Mon, 21 May 2007 19:29:20 -0400 From: W B Hacker User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070221 SeaMonkey/1.1.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] XML References: <13426df10705210957w2982fa31lc6c22ff554fcd629@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Topicbox-Message-UUID: 6e479732-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 Geoffrey Avila wrote: > > > On a related note: > > Somebody at Sun decided that the thing Unix needed most of all was a way > to programmatically manipulate "init" via XML. What's worse is that a > completely independent team at Apple committed a starkly similar > atrocity at almost the same time. > > http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal/smf-quickstart.html > > http://developer.apple.com/macosx/launchd.html > > Could someone explain this to me? Why would you do this? How could this > possibly be a net improvement? > > -GBA > I'll try. This presumes you have been around dogs. Dogs have a way of ummhh.. 'grooming' themselves that (fortunately) most humans could not manage alone. Not enough flex in the back and neck. Can't speak to motivation... Unfortunately, there are fewer such limitations in software development. So - the reason for many of these departures' from common sense is the same as that of a Northbound dog licking his Southbound end: He does it simply because he is able to, and no one really cares to interfere. Bill