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by myztic 3798 days ago
Reminds me of Cantrill, more so his story when they completely bricked a machine of a fellow worker once and then took a close look at the standard[1].

# rm -rf /

Among other things, it will delete the current directory. In the standard it does not say what to delete first, In their implementation it will try to remove the current directory first -> undefined behaviour -> it fails.

The logic behind it: When is it really your goal to delete your entire machine, mostly never, you don't type it out by accident, but shell scripts with unset variables might do it.

And regarding Poettering's response[2] (not trying to start a fight): It's Poettering, what do you expect? You can hate or love systemd, but part of why people hate it is his intellectual arrogance in everything he does.

[1] He tells the story somewhere in here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6XQUciI-Sc (quite entertaining)

[2] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402

2 comments

> And regarding Poettering's response[2] (not trying to start a fight): It's Poettering, what do you expect? You can hate or love systemd, but part of why people hate it is his intellectual arrogance in everything he does.

I don't think it's just his arrogance, it's that it's not backed up by substance. Linus is an arrogant prick, yeah? But his kernel works pretty well, so he gets some slack. All pulseaudio ever did for me was waste my time and break my ability to output sound. Systemd wastes my time, makes my computer work different for no reason that's apparent to me, and now makes it easy for me to brick my machine if I'm not careful and I have a terrible bios[1].

[1] I've yet to meet a bios that isn't terrible, although hopefully few are terrible in this specific way.

I disagree with Poettering's technical decisions more often than I agree with them, but to be fair, some of PA is because the distros adopted it early. Heck, when Ubunutu picked it up the readme still described it as something along the lines of "The server that breaks your audio system."
EDIT: "bricked" is wrong, they completely deleted the machine. Had to correct this ;)