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by IshKebab 183 days ago
Not a joke. I knew they used to use a pile of janky shell scripts for their init system. I didn't know they still do. That's disappointing.

And cesarb is correct - the issue isn't scripts; it's shell scripts, especially Bash and similar. Something like Deno/Typescript would be a decent option for example. Nushell is probably acceptable.

Even Python - while a terrible choice - is a better option than shell scripts.
1 comments
matheusmoreira 183 days ago
The issue is POSIX standardizing legacy stuff like shells, thereby tempting people to write "portable" software, leading these technologies to ossify and stick with us for half a century and counting. Someone comes along and builds something better but gets threatened for not following "the UNIX way".
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IshKebab 183 days ago
This is a very good point. I wonder how hard it would be to get POSIX to standardise a scripting language that isn't awful.

Probably never going to happen. There is a dearth of good scripting languages, and I would imagine any POSIX committee is like 98% greybeard naysayers who think 70s Unix was the pinnacle of computing.

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valleyer 182 days ago
POSIX does not specify the init/rc script system, so it's not a factor here at all. A POSIX-compliant system could use Python scripts. macOS (which is UNIX 03 certified) uses launchd. A POSIX system has to ship the shell, not use it.

And FreeBSD isn't actually POSIX-certified anyway!

The real consideration here is simply that there are tons of existing rc scripts for BSDs, and switching them all would be a large task.

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