[bachmeier]

> I absolutely love the trend of rewriting classic Unix utilities

I avoid them unless I'm capable of maintaining them myself. My primary reason for using classic Unix utilities is trusting that they'll still work in a few years. The initial stages of a rewrite can be a lot of fun, but I want to use it long after the excitement has worn off.

[sanderjd]

YMMV, but many of us find it easier to maintain rust + cargo than the old C + autotools mess.

[scbrg]

And yet, exa is deprecated :-)

[Klonoar]

If the owner is outright missing, to the point where the newer fork owners can't even get the repo archived, one would reasonably assume that they'd need to rename/rebrand the tool in order to publish it elsewhere.

It frankly doesn't seem like a deprecation in the traditional sense.

[mingus88]

Either way, it still speaks to the maintainability of these modern replacements, many of which are personal projects.

tools like ls or grep are certainly showing their age, but that has also been their strength. The POSIX ecosystem comes in many flavors but I can always depend on it.

It’s not like I can ever expect to shell into any arbitrary system or container and expect to have exa/lsd/rg or any of these nice replacements available to me. My tooling needs to be somewhat more portable.

[Klonoar]

> My tooling needs to be somewhat more portable.

Ah yes, because it's 100% impossible to learn new tools and fall back to the core ones when you need to. ;P

I've been doing this for decades now, it's just not that big of a deal.

[jjgreen]

... as in

   if [ -z "$(which exa)" ]
   then
     LS1='ls -1'
   else
     :
   fi
   ${LS1} ${SOME_DIR} | ... 

?

[sanderjd]

Yes but people did not find it daunting to create a fork.

But if what the comment I replied to meant by "capable of maintaining them myself" was about having an organizational structure where they could become an official maintainer of the official project rather than needing to fork it if the owner becomes unavailable, then yep, that's a great point about these single-owner projects.

But my original interpretation was about the difficulty of maintaining the code. To me, these rust tools are a huge improvement in that way.

[scbrg]

OK. Then we interpreted that comment differently. To me the point was that with ls, you don't need to worry about what happens when it's abandoned. You know it's going to be there in ten years. And probably fifty too.

[bachmeier]

Your interpretation is what I intended. Thing is, I don't anticipate ever needing to touch the code if I use the utilities installed by default on whatever Linux distribution I'm using (which includes Windows, which I use as an interface for WSL). Even if I was comfortable with Rust, which I'm not and haven't used in years, it would still take a lot of time to understand the code well enough to make changes.

[sanderjd]

Yeah, I totally get the longevity argument. But that precludes any useful new tools, and I'm personally never happy with the status quo; I don't think the software developers of the 60s and 70s discovered the perfect final set of useful userspace tools. And none of them would have thought they had either, and would have scoffed at the idea of being stuck indefinitely on a static set of commands. Their whole philosophy was about making it easy to make and cobble together little tools like this!

But in practice, the tooling for making those tools never got very good. (That is, in my opinion - there is at least one commenter here who replied to me about actually liking autotools, which is fair enough, just not my opinion.)

So while fully recognizing the value of the old tools that will always exist, for new useful tools, I'm very happy to see this renaissance of writing them in rust. In my opinion, it is much easier to build them, dig into their implementation, and contribute to them (especially without introducing security vulnerabilities or data races).

Where I do absolutely agree, and what I do wish for is that more of this were being done under the auspices of an organization, like how the `ls` most of us are using is likely maintained by either GNU or one of the BSD organizations.

[dkdbejwi383]

This is a GitHub ownership model problem, not a problem with the Rust toolchain or the concept of creating modern, user-friendly command-line software.

[kibwen]

This is a non-sequitur. The repo is deprecated because the repo owner is absent, and development is continuing in a fork.

[pohl]

Yetter still, it (eza)is being maintained.

[saurik]

FWIW, my mileage definitely varied: autotools--which is quite easy if you bother to learn how it works and is then almost infinitely flexible--has pretty much never failed me (I think there was one incident for a while related to building stuff for iOS? regardless this was fixed long ago), but I have had to file and participate in a number of bugs on cargo, most of which are still open :/, and I haven't even developed anything in Rust myself yet... I've merely tried to compile and use stuff other people wrote and run into myriad ridiculous problems.

[diarrhea]

> quite easy if you bother to learn how it works

A timeless tautology.

Some things just are easy and pleasant. Caddy server, Cargo, ripgrep come to mind. Some things are easy only once you've learned them. No kidding!

[sanderjd]

We'll just have to agree to disagree about autotools :) But I feel like I did try to bother to learn how it works, but nonetheless failed, and I think you're right that it is almost infinitely flexible, but I think that is not a good thing.

Agreed that cargo has bugs and I hope it improves over time (granted: it is not at all new). But say what you want about cargo, at least it's an ethos!

[faitswulff]

> I've merely tried to compile and use stuff other people wrote and run into myriad ridiculous problems.

Which ones gave you trouble?

[bjourne]

Try getting autotools to work on Windows. Then try getting it to compile with Visual Studio. Then try getting it to cross-compile 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit system. If you aren't bald already I promise you'll tear your hair out.

[gilcot]

windows…

[zanellato19]

Which system do you use that cargo failed to compile? On Linux and Mac I have never had anything fail to compile for me with it.

[predictabl3]

lol, as a distro package maintainer, I've literally stopped packaging and stopped using software that uses autotools. Given me meson or give me a software compiled in a respectable language, or preferably, death. I'd take cargo and its crates.io namespace warts every day over autotools, and twice on every day of the week.

[justcool393]

reminds me of this old joke

> I saw a book entitled "Die GNU Autotools" and I thought "My feelings exactly". Turns out the book was in German.

https://twitter.com/timmartin2/status/23365017839599616

gnu autotools i suppose works for some projects, but wow does it seem to be completely annoying to use.

[JohnFen]

> My primary reason for using classic Unix utilities is trusting that they'll still work in a few years

Mine is that they're ubiquitous and I can rely on them existing on all Unices. For the same reason, I avoid getting used to any features that are unique to a particular platform or distribution. It just causes additional friction when I'm working on a different system.

[smartmic]

s/they'll still work in a few years/they'll still work in a few decades/

Related: the Lindy effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)

[sundarurfriend]

exa was the first utility program to segfault on me in over a decade. Brought me a useful dose of realism about the maturity of these projects, so I'm much more measured and careful about adopting them now.

[pdimitar]

For what it's worth, I'm using several Rust tools replacing classic UNIX programs for at least 3 years now and they never crashed.

Beware of [HN] bias. People are very quick to rain on Rust for reasons none of them have ever explained substantively and with facts, and many others are quick to agree without checking.

[sundarurfriend]

> Beware of [HN] bias. People are very quick to rain on Rust for reasons none of them have ever explained substantively and with facts, and many others are quick to agree without checking.

I'm not sure what this paragraph is doing in this context. I was specifically talking about my own experience. I see far more praise for Rust compared to negative comments in any case, and was biased towards assuming "Rust rewrites of tools may lack features (due to being newer) or be less portable or whatever else, but the one thing they'll have is stability and reliability". That came crashing down when exa crashed and core dumped.

It didn't turn me into some anti-Rust fanatic either (which people seem to interpret any criticism of Rust-related things as), it just made me realize that in the end it's still up to the individual tool and programmer, and I shouldn't make strong assumptions based on the language a tool is written in.

[pdimitar]

> I'm not sure what this paragraph is doing in this context. I was specifically talking about my own experience.

Just a small precautionary statement. I've observed it enough times to get very wary of it.

> I see far more praise for Rust compared to negative comments in any case, and was biased towards assuming "Rust rewrites of tools may lack features (due to being newer) or be less portable or whatever else, but the one thing they'll have is stability and reliability".

Filter bubbles in a nutshell, I usually see mostly negative ones and barely see any praise (though I'd define "praise" here as "fan-boying", and NOT as "recognizing the strong sides"; the latter is quite normal and should not be called praising).

> That came crashing down when exa crashed and core dumped.

That's the part I find a bit overly dramatic, this was likely Rust's `panic` mechanism so they likely just didn't handle an expectation / assertion in the code? I had several Rust services in production for years and former colleagues have contacted me to tell me the thing hasn't crashed even once and was only ever restarted for upgrades.

> It didn't turn me into some anti-Rust fanatic either (which people seem to interpret any criticism of Rust-related things as), it just made me realize that in the end it's still up to the individual tool and programmer, and I shouldn't make strong assumptions based on the language a tool is written in.

Yes, fair. If you pepper your Rust code with `.expect()` and `.unwrap()`, the program ending abruptly is expected because the team hasn't taken precautions to handle all possible errors.

[just_testing]

Which tools, if I may ask?

[Ferret7446]

Wow. Assuming that is true/not due to a misunderstanding, that really brings a dose of reality to the "Rust is safe!" selling point. Doesn't matter if the language is technically safe, if in real world use it still segfaults (even if due to programmer misuse).

[dorfsmay]

Not even ripgrep?

[justin_oaks]

I usually don't reach for new command line tools, but ripgrep is one where I feel stupid for not using it sooner.

Even VS Code uses it for its search beneath the hood.