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

[Norman Wilson]

I must admit I don't see much point in this conversation, even as
humour, since the humour is easily turned mean-spirited or self-
aggrandizing.

What difference does it make if Ken runs MacOS systems or Raspberry
Pis or just spends his time teaching flying instructors?  When he
started out in computing, writing your own everything was pretty
much the only way to get things that worked.  Now it's a huge amount
of work, because modern storage controllers and network devices and
even CPUs and memory subsystems are so much more complicated, and to
talk to anything else requires supporting complicated network protocols
and interpreting multiple encodings and languages and data formats
and even running stupid little flashy programs.  (How much more
complicated is a web browser these days than an entire operating
system used to be?  How much simpler could you make it and still
render most of what's on the web these days?  And how much work
would all that be, and why bother?)

When I started out in computing, making a computer run reliably and
well still required understanding the hardware and OS software in
some detail, and I found that interesting and pursued that as a
vocation.  I spent much of the 1980s doing that for pay, including
six wonderful years in (not-so-wonderful to me) New Jersey working
with smart people like Ken.

Nowadays I get paid for helping to keep a large computing environment
running.  The point is not to show off my OS-design chops, but to
make things work for a particular user community that needs particular
things.  Things that are far more complicated than I'm up to designing
and writing and supporting, and most of them involving areas of
computing in which I don't have a lot of interest.  There are plenty
of problems that interest me in making it all work, and in designing
system setups and writing tools to help us make it all work better.
I don't see this as a step down from bare-metal OS work, much as I
used to enjoy that, and much as I might enjoy it now should I get back
into it (though it's also possible that modern hardware is such an
undisciplined mess that I'd just find it frustrating).

I used to keep hacking on the old New Jersey Unix system as a hobby.
After a while it wasn't interesting enough compared to other things
I could do with my time, but I kept it going for a while because I'd
made some of my home computing infrastructure depend on it.  Eventually
I mended that.  Maybe I'll get back to it some day, maybe I won't.

I still build my own tools from time to time, both for paid work and
for personal use.  Sometimes I do that because I dislike the existing
tools I can find for the same job, sometimes just because it's a chance
to learn more about some network protocol or file format or whatnot.
But it's no more a sign of virtue to roll my own stuff than it is to
insist on using only stuff someone else wrote (or that was supplied
by a particular company or by someone who subscribes to a particular
political philosophy or whatnot).  In the end it is, or ought to be,
just about getting the damn job done reasonably well within the
current constraints.

Getting the job done within current constraints was, after all,
pretty much what Unix was originally made for.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
Neither proud nor sad no longer to be using a
MicroVAX running 10/e Unix as a home firewall