A rant in two parts.
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A rant in two parts. This is part one…
The discussion earlier today about systemd replacing /var/log with some dedicated facility and a special command, journalctl, to query it impelled me to write up just what I think is wrong with a lot of Linux. Basically, they've given up on the Unix philosophy of small, composable, generally usable but simple tools in favor of a mass of large, specialized tools. "They've paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”
Why specify a pager instead of just piping the output to a pager? Being able to search on a specific field is nice, but grep can do that. Maybe grep should be enhanced to say “apply the RE to fields m..n” (which is easy enough with awk anyway), and arguably it could take a file giving mappings of a fieldname to a field number. That's a generally useful tool; why limit it to systemd log files? Searching by time is nice, but it's nice in other contexts, e.g., the output of 'ls -l' on a large directory. The same goes for json-style output: why limit it to this context? (I won't even rant about why there has to be a single-line vs. multiline json option—that could also be a pair of simple, general commands.)
Too many Linux subsystems (or rather, their authors) have decided that they are the world and have to provide lots of functionality specific to that subsystem, rather than building general tools. Steve Jobs once said of Windows, “The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste.” That's what's going on here. -
P [email protected] shared this topic
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@SteveBellovin absolutely agree - a big part of what made Linux succeed was the ease of use that came with plain text configuration and log files (iirc there was even an early 2000s internal Microsoft business intel report that leaked that said exactly that)
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@mkoek @SteveBellovin that is why conspiracy is that poettinger is a microsoft agent sent into the linux world to destroy it from inside out.
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Embrace-extend-extinguish doesn't work when the software in question is FOSS and can be forked at any time.
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xyhhx 🔻 (plz hire me)replied to argv minus one last edited by
@argv_minus_one oh you sweet summer child
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argv minus onereplied to xyhhx 🔻 (plz hire me) last edited by
I'm in my 40s and been using Linux (and raging at Microsoft) since I was a teen. Nothing summer child about me, I'm afraid.
I have observed exactly one exception to the aforementioned wisdom: web browsers, which are simply too big, complex, and fast-moving for the community to take over their development.
In every other case I've seen where a commercial FOSS vendor did a rug pull on something as widely used as systemd, e.g. Redis, it was forked, fast.
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xyhhx 🔻 (plz hire me)replied to argv minus one last edited by
@argv_minus_one what i was elluding to was that EEE was specifically invented/coined for open source software
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argv minus onereplied to xyhhx 🔻 (plz hire me) last edited by
I remember EEE as the strategy Microsoft used against Netscape. They embraced the web, extended it with proprietary HTML elements and the like, and thus extinguished other browsers (for a while).
People were worried that this strategy would be used against FOSS as well, but as far as I know, every attempt thus far has failed to grant the offending company any real power, because the community simply forked its product during the extinguish phase.
