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by coldtea 3848 days ago
That's an important point. I think however elegant for its time the 70s/early 80s UNIX design, it holds us back in many ways.

It's amazing that we still widely use a language without a string type and memory safety like C for example, instead of something like Rust, Swift and co -- with occasional excursions to unsafety maybe for speed/interoperability with older libs, but not as the default for the whole goddamn codebase. And don't get me started in stdlib and co.

Other stuff too. A common "file resources" standard. X11. All the way to Makefiles and permissions (with stuff bolted on, like ACL). Oh, and the horrible conventions of file paths (dumping everything in /usr/bin and co, splitting an installed app into 5+ different directories for man files, resources, etc).

It's amazing how even a simple improvement like systemd gets tons of negativity from admin types and people who think 70s designs should be set in stone.
1 comments
digi_owl 3848 days ago
> It's amazing how even a simple improvement like systemd gets tons of negativity from admin types and people who think 70s designs should be set in stone.

That is misrepresenting (perhaps to the point of straw man) the systemd complaints.

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coldtea 3848 days ago
>That is misrepresenting (perhaps to the point of straw man) the systemd complaints.

Maybe, but not the one's I've seen. Can you point to some collection of systemd complaints that go beyond "this is not how things used to be done"?

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digi_owl 3848 days ago
http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_...
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coldtea 3848 days ago
Most of these are either of the "it's not how it used to be done variety", bug complaints (which can and do get fixed), and "straying of the unix way" (as if that is a technical argument.

Sometimes you DO need to stray off the UNIX way to improve things, namely any time "does one thing well" comes to the detriment of "needs overall overview and cooperation instead of a disparate set of things that can't be glued properly for the task based on a motto meant for simple text-based input/output programs".

There are some valid concerns too, but nothing that's a show-stopper -- which also explains why the show didn't stop.

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digi_owl 3848 days ago
OVerview and cooperation, sure. But everything in one ball of code because of "APIs"?!
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