[TUHS] UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what, user now?

[TUHS] UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what, user now?

[KenUnix]

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Interesting Unix related articles.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/17/ken_thompson_is_a_maccie/

and

https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/

and

https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/13/unix_workstations_lessons/

Enjoy,
Ken

-- 
WWL 📚

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[TUHS] Re: UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what, user now?

[segaloco via TUHS]

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Raspbian is the only "stock" Linux distro I've tried on my RPi, used it as a daily driver for a while. My standing gripes with the system have largely evaporated in the past few years what with formal 64-bit versions and having figured out how to rebase the system on sysvinit pretty well. The base install is pretty well provisioned, I don't recall having to install compilers and such. One of my chronic irks with Linux distros is how most seem to forgo a good chunk of what you'd expect on any UNIX worth its weight: Often no C compiler or needed headers installed, sometimes documentation shunted off to different packages, no yacc, lex, awk, heck I've seen distros without ed and vi, I think Manjaro is in this boat. I found the latter incredibly stupid, submitted an Issue to their Gitlab, and was pretty much ignored and the issue quietly closed with no resolution. Pico/nano will never be the standard editor, people need to stop trying to make it be so...

Do Linux providers even know the POSIX standard exists? No I don't expect them to go pay for certification but geeze, the amount of times in the past few years I've propped up a random distro on a machine or VM and been unable to rely on even the most basic stuff being there is disheartening. No wonder people don't use Linux in the UNIX-y way so often, half the darn system isn't represented in most Linux base installs. Is this the LSBs fault or does nobody look at that anymore either? My experiences recently say not...

- Matt G.

P.S. Got a nasty gram (that I'm not replying to, arguing over the internet is stupid) about some sort of reply all thing, so I'm going to only reply to TUHS and kill the Cc list as an experiment to see if people get livid over words on screens that come to them due to their membership in a list rather than come to them due to their being Ccd on emails that also come by way of a mailing list that they're also members of. If this email reaches you in an unacceptable manner, sorry, I don't know what people want from me, but if it's a problem I'll explore what control I have over the various mechanisms arbitrary email clients and communication conventions are present in the current email landscape (hint: not much)
------- Original Message -------
On Saturday, March 18th, 2023 at 5:51 AM, KenUnix <ken.unix.guy@gmail.com> wrote:

> Interesting Unix related articles.
>
> https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/17/ken_thompson_is_a_maccie/
>
> and
>
> https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
>
> and
>
> https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/13/unix_workstations_lessons/
>
> Enjoy,
> Ken
> --
>
> WWL 📚

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[TUHS] Re: UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what, user now?

[Theodore Ts'o]

On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 04:21:24PM +0000, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> 
> Do Linux providers even know the POSIX standard exists? No I don't
> expect them to go pay for certification but geeze, the amount of
> times in the past few years I've propped up a random distro on a
> machine or VM and been unable to rely on even the most basic stuff
> being there is disheartening. No wonder people don't use Linux in
> the UNIX-y way so often, half the darn system isn't represented in
> most Linux base installs. Is this the LSBs fault or does nobody look
> at that anymore either? My experiences recently say not...

The Linux Standard Base has largely been abandoned --- none of the
major Linux companies were willing to pay their engineers to spend
time working on it.  (It was one of those things that really only
mattered to people who were selling software to enterprises, and the
*reason* why companies spent $$$ paying engineers to work on LSB and
going to ISO meetings was so that enterprise softare vendors could
more easily ship product that would work equally well on Red Hat
Enterprise Linux and SuSE Enterprise Linux.)

But even when LSB was around (Debian is dropping LSB support in the
next release), it was generally not installed by default and was *not*
part of the base install.  If you installed the LSB package, it would
drag in all of the userspace utilities and libraries needed to provide
POSIX.1 and POSIX.2 conformance.

One of the reasons why users prefer a very small base install is
because if they are trying to install on small systems (such as
Rasberry PI), or if they are using container systems (e.g., Docker),
they want to keep the base system as small as possible.  And there are
utilities like uuencode and uudecode, which while required by POSIX.2,
in reality, the most users for most Linux distributions don't use, so
it's not installed by default.  If you want it, you can always install
the sharutils package.

Finally, I'll note that what Posix.2 requires has changed over time.
For example uucp used to be required for POSIX.2 compliance.  It no
longer is required.  In addition, POSIX.2 has withdrawn tools like
banner and chroot, and they will be withdrawing calendar, col, cpio,
pg, spell, sum, and other utilities in the next revisions of the
standard.

Complaining about what is the default seems to me to rather pointless.
And if you are going to insist on complaining aobut it, what about
Solaris?  The default Solaris install didn't come with cc or fort77
installed, even though they are required by POSIX.2.  You had to pay
$$$ to get an optional package if you wanted those tools, and Solaris
was still considered "Unix" since it was descended from AT&T code, and
they didn't need to present their system for POSIX compliance before
being able to use the "Unix" trademark.  (And if they did, they would
presumably just state in their conformance document that you had to
pay $$$ for a copy of Sun Studio.)

And I can assure you that Sun Microsystems knew about POSIX.  They
just chose to not include everything required by POSIX.2 in their
default install.

					- Ted

[TUHS] Re: UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what, user now?

[James Johnston]

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Speaking as someone who's watched it happen before, Ken HAS been known to
troll the industry once or twice, or maybe 3 times, or ...



On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 1:40 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 04:21:24PM +0000, segaloco via TUHS wrote:
> >
> > Do Linux providers even know the POSIX standard exists? No I don't
> > expect them to go pay for certification but geeze, the amount of
> > times in the past few years I've propped up a random distro on a
> > machine or VM and been unable to rely on even the most basic stuff
> > being there is disheartening. No wonder people don't use Linux in
> > the UNIX-y way so often, half the darn system isn't represented in
> > most Linux base installs. Is this the LSBs fault or does nobody look
> > at that anymore either? My experiences recently say not...
>
> The Linux Standard Base has largely been abandoned --- none of the
> major Linux companies were willing to pay their engineers to spend
> time working on it.  (It was one of those things that really only
> mattered to people who were selling software to enterprises, and the
> *reason* why companies spent $$$ paying engineers to work on LSB and
> going to ISO meetings was so that enterprise softare vendors could
> more easily ship product that would work equally well on Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux and SuSE Enterprise Linux.)
>
> But even when LSB was around (Debian is dropping LSB support in the
> next release), it was generally not installed by default and was *not*
> part of the base install.  If you installed the LSB package, it would
> drag in all of the userspace utilities and libraries needed to provide
> POSIX.1 and POSIX.2 conformance.
>
> One of the reasons why users prefer a very small base install is
> because if they are trying to install on small systems (such as
> Rasberry PI), or if they are using container systems (e.g., Docker),
> they want to keep the base system as small as possible.  And there are
> utilities like uuencode and uudecode, which while required by POSIX.2,
> in reality, the most users for most Linux distributions don't use, so
> it's not installed by default.  If you want it, you can always install
> the sharutils package.
>
> Finally, I'll note that what Posix.2 requires has changed over time.
> For example uucp used to be required for POSIX.2 compliance.  It no
> longer is required.  In addition, POSIX.2 has withdrawn tools like
> banner and chroot, and they will be withdrawing calendar, col, cpio,
> pg, spell, sum, and other utilities in the next revisions of the
> standard.
>
> Complaining about what is the default seems to me to rather pointless.
> And if you are going to insist on complaining aobut it, what about
> Solaris?  The default Solaris install didn't come with cc or fort77
> installed, even though they are required by POSIX.2.  You had to pay
> $$$ to get an optional package if you wanted those tools, and Solaris
> was still considered "Unix" since it was descended from AT&T code, and
> they didn't need to present their system for POSIX compliance before
> being able to use the "Unix" trademark.  (And if they did, they would
> presumably just state in their conformance document that you had to
> pay $$$ for a copy of Sun Studio.)
>
> And I can assure you that Sun Microsystems knew about POSIX.  They
> just chose to not include everything required by POSIX.2 in their
> default install.
>
>                                         - Ted
>
>

-- 
James D. (jj) Johnston

Chief Scientist, Immersion Networks

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[TUHS] Re: UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what, user now?

[Adam Thornton]

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On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 2:40 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:

> One of the reasons why users prefer a very small base install is
> because if they are trying to install on small systems (such as
> Rasberry PI),
>
>
Yes, I know what you mean, and yes, I agree that it's a fifty dollar
computer (if you can find one).  But it is sort of funny that something
with a gigabyte of RAM and several-to-dozens of GB of storage is a very
small system these days.

Adam

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[TUHS] Re: UNIX co-creator Ken Thompson is a… what, user now?

[Justin Andrusk]

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You were just trolling the crowd around migrating to Raspbian, right? ;)

"KenUnix" <ken.unix.guy@gmail.com> writes:

> Interesting Unix related articles.
>
> https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/17/ken_thompson_is_a_maccie/
>
> and
>
> https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/17/unix_is_dead/
>
> and
>
> https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/13/unix_workstations_lessons/
>
> Enjoy,
> Ken


--
Regards,
Justin

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