Re: [TUHS] [tuhs] The Unix shell: a 50-year view

[Steffen Nurpmeso <steffen@sdaoden.eu>]

Steve Nickolas wrote in
 <alpine.DEB.2.21.2107021910240.15013@sd-119843.dedibox.fr>:
 |On Fri, 2 Jul 2021, Henry Bent wrote:
 |> On Fri, 2 Jul 2021 at 17:38, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
 |>
 |>> As I started reading it I found plenty to disagree with in the first few
 |>> paragraphs but they completely lost me at "After all, moving from System
 |>> V init scripts to systemd has arguably improvedthe Linux boot sequence."
 |>>
 |>> Um, no, just, no.
 |>
 |> After rattling around in the back of a train car with nothing but my
 |> thoughts, I emerged and said:
 |>
 |> "systemd is a pox on our way of life"
 |>
 |> and then promptly rolled over and went back to sleep.
 |>
 |> -Henry
 |>
 |
 |The Linux distro I use does use systemd but I can ignore it and go on with 
 |my life as if it were still running sysvinit.  So it's not that big a deal 
 |to me.
 |
 |I'd prefer that they kept sysvinit, but eh.  What's that saying?  "Those 
 |who fail to understand Unix are condemned to recreate it, poorly" ?

Well iwd(8) for example that i happen to have installed as
a replacement for wpa_supplicant just today (because
.. i installed my beloved sysvinit/BSD rc based CRUX-Linux on
a new spare laptop, a 18 month old but totally new IdeaPad S145,
and since i do not have initrd kernels but compile an all-builtin
one i use a generic kernel in order to lsmod(8) in order to be
able to create a custom kernel with a modified "make localyesmod"
that Linux supports, here ArchLinux 2020.12, because AlpineLinux
did not do it, somehow, and whereas i hate that ArchLinux now that
all old developers fled does not even ship install instructions it
actually does come with iwd/iwctl, and it happened that iwctl
looked so much better to me than wpa_cli of wpa_supplicant, that
i took the time and replaced there here, iwctl has at least one
bug though, iwd ditto, and i must say that whereas iwd is much
smaller is has a larger memory footprint than wpa_supplicant, and
.. whatever), and note that iwd neither supports a normal syslog
nor command line parameters to configure paths etc., the latter
have to come in via environment if they shall, and the manual says
these are "normally provided by systemd" (which is not true .. for
me).  And no syslog at all!  No PID file handling.  And bugs even
though Intel.com paid for it.  I mean "get up, stand up", they do
a thousand things and not seldom i wonder.

@Tony Finch: wonderful reading of the first two pages, thanks for
this link!  It seems Knuth always had "a touch" for writing good,
and for good writing.

P.S.: not that do-one-thing's like sysklogd are bug free, for
example the sysklogd CRUX now uses/offers introduced a new bug
that causes /var/log/kernel to print monotonic clock times or
what, mind you, just now it is "Jun 30 13:13:16" (for "kent").

--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)