[TUHS] daemons are not to be exorcised

[tytso@mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o)]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 10:40:44PM -0600, Grant Taylor via TUHS wrote:
> 
> I think many people working on Linux are genuinely trying to make it better.
> They just have no conceptual history to guide them.

There are also ways in which Unix is just simply deficient.  For
example, take syslog.  It's simple, sure, but it has an extremely
simple structure, and it's not nearly flexible enough for more
sophisticated use cases.  As a result, *many* commercial Unix systems
have tried reinventing an event logging system which had more structure.

Tru64 (OSF/1) had uerf.  AIX had eventlog.  Solaris had a structured
event log as part of ILOM.  And, guess what?  syslog-ng came up with a
set of extensions to add structure.  And sytemd has come up journald.

People can point at journald and laugh, and say, why so complicated?
Why not the pure, simple Unix approach that was good enough for BSDh
4.3?  But I'll point out that *many* commercial Unix systems had
decided that syslog was not good enough, and tried to invent their
own.  Some that were pretty good, IMHO, and some that were a creeping
horror.  (And your opinion may be different than mine about which were
the creeping horror.  :-)

So it's not so simple.  Unix dind't have to deal with hardware which
was hot-pluggable, for example.  How you handle devices that appear
and disappear after boot with a static set of device nodes in /dev is
another case where different commercial Unix systems have had their
own divergent idea of how to solve the system --- and of course, some
completely punted and coulthdn't deal with things like USB devices at
all.

Early NetBSD and FreeBSD systems required a reboot when you inserted a
PCMCIA card, and would crash if you ever tried to eject a PCMCIA card.
You may not like Linux's solution for supporting these sorts of
hardware --- but tell me: How would you hack V7 Unix to support them?  

					- Ted