18 ms·

This reminded me of a Rob Pike comment. I can't find the text, but it was along the lines of, "I recently tried Linux. It was as if every bug I fixed in the 1

by thisrod 11y ago

This reminded me of a Rob Pike comment. I can't find the text, but it was along the lines of, "I recently tried Linux. It was as if every bug I fixed in the 1980s had reverted."

kazinator 11y ago
That was baseless posturing. A famous study and its follow-up found that the utilities on GNU/Linux are more robust, and that was twenty years ago: ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/technical_papers/fuzz-revisited.pdf [1995] "This study parallels our 1990 study (that tested only the basic UNIX utilities); all systems that we compared between 1990 and 1995 noticeably improved in reliability, but still had significant rates of failure. The reliability of the basic utilities from GNU and Linux were noticeably better than those of the commercial systems." I doubt there has been much improvement in those commercial Unixes; they are basically dead. (What would be the business case for fixing something in userland utility on commerical Unix?) The maintainers of the free BSD's have been carrying that torch, but they don't believe in features. Stepping into a BSD variant is like a trip back to the 1980's. Not exactly the real 1980's, but a parallel 1980's in which Unix is more robust---but the features are all rolled back, so it's just about as unpleasant to use.
- setra 11y ago
  Then the commercial systems must have been horrible. Take a look at GNU code, then at plan 9 code. Combine a few GNU core utils, and you have more code than the whole plan 9 kernel. Granted Plan 9 came out a little passed 1990.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    Only by not using subordinate clauses did you just avoid saying "plan 9" and "commercial" in the same sentence! Where is Plan 9 deployed? Who are the customers? Plan 9 is a strawman representative of "commercial Unix". > Combine a few GNU core utils, and you have more code than the whole plan 9 kernel. When you actually sit down and think of the cases that can occur, that translates into code. Handle this, handle that, and the KLOC's just pile up. Speaking of kernel size, what makes a kernel code base big? Why, device drivers for lots of hardware.
    - cplease 11y ago
      Just replying to point out that the grayed out comment above is the correct one. There is ugliness in coreutils, but it mature, functional, proven ugliness. A lot of it is even there for a reason. It's not difficult to make an elegant toy in isolation.
      - setra 11y ago
        checkout the different implementations of echo across various operating systems: "https://gist.github.com/dchest/1091803" https://gist.github.com/dchest/1091803".
        2trill2spill 11y ago
        That link is not working for me, Github is throwing a 404.
        cjs2 11y ago
        The link has an extraneous `"` character at the end. It works fine if you remove it.
        setra 11y ago
        Browser seem to include the end quote when clicked. It mush be removed for the url to work.
        vinkelhake 11y ago
        I've used the -e option in GNU's echo many times. The various other versions are strictly less useful to me. Does the option really belong in echo? Who knows, but it's certainly been useful to me. UNIX fifth edition goes for absolute minimalism. Echo in Plan 9 is apparently used enough that it's worthwhile to optimize the number of times write is called. FreeBSD echo looks like someone just learned about writev. OpenBSD's seem like the sanest of the minimalists. What's the takeaway for you?
        11y ago
- cokernel_hacker 11y ago
  I don't think Rob meant stability. Rob was probably referring to the reality that modern Linux hasn't innovated itself past SVR4 by any appreciable amount. We are still using X, still using terminals powered by control codes, etc. Rob probably sees things like LANG and LC_ALL as bugs. His fix was UTF-8 everywhere, always. Where is Linux? Still in bag-of-bytes-o-rama.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    I agree with Rob's "UTF-8 everywhere". I took this approach in the TXR language. Its I/O streams output and input UTF-8, and only that. Period. (There is no virtual switch for alternative encodings.) Internally, everything is a wide character code point. I do not call the "fuck my C program function" known as setlocale, and no behavior related to character handling or localization is influenced by magic environment strings. LANG and LC_ALL are the work of ISO C and POSIX; they are not the fault of Linux. Linux has these in the name of compliance; they were foisted upon the free word, essentially.
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    That and getting rid of the TTY altogether. We aren't using punched cards EDIT: people hate when I say this, which amuses me. The TTY must die !!!!
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - nils-m-holm 11y ago
      > The TTY must die!!!! Being sight-impaired, I have to disagree strongly! The TTY is the only thing that lets me adjust the font size of all programs running in it without going through lots of trouble. (BTW: didn't downvote your comment.)
      - guard-of-terra 11y ago
        Browsers let you do that. KDE also does, so do other environments. For a quick hack, set your sceen DPI to 50.
- 2trill2spill 11y ago
  > The maintainers of the free BSD's have been carrying that torch, but they don't believe in features. Stepping into a BSD variant is like a trip back to the 1980's. Not exactly the real 1980's, but a parallel 1980's in which Unix is more robust---but the features are all rolled back, so it's just about as unpleasant to use. Sorry but that's all BS. FreeBSD is definitely a modern system, has lot's of features and is emphatically, millions of times better than a 1980's Unix. Linux may have a larger community than the BSD's but saying the BSD's are like stepping into the 1980's is rather disingenuous.
  - dijit 11y ago
    He wants; Games, SystemD, complicated control interfaces, and most of all a fully interactive desktop environment which mounts his drives for him and plays flash videos.. .. Without taking much time to configure it. This is fair enough but it's not what I want in a machine, openBSD might be "behind" but it feels complete, supported, sustainable and most of all "very well thought out". FreeBSD is also exceedingly good, but makes trade offs in how clean the implementation of the OS feels to keep up with linux. or, at least it feels like this to me. But to say the BSDs aren't modern is deluded, there's a reason they're known to have the fastest software networking stack in the world.
    - kazinator 11y ago
      I do not want any of that stuff. I found FreeBSD to be unusable simply in the command line environment. I was using only a text console login. I simply wanted a decent shell and editor. Heck, FreeBSD wouldn't even scroll back with the de facto standard Shift-PgUp. > mounts his drives for him That amazing advancement in Unix usability can be achieved by something called the "automount daemon" which was introduced in the late 1980's in SunOS (the real, pre-Solaris one). Tom Lyon developed the original automount software at Sun Microsystems: SunOS 4.0 made automounting available in 1988. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automounter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automounter] You basically just wrote a comment which paints a 1988 commercial Unix feature as a Linux frill that BSD people don't need. FreeBSD has caved in and has autofs as of 10.1: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=autofs&sektion=5 https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=autofs&sektion=5 That was released in November 2014, only some 26 years after Sun rolled out the feature. Better late than never, I suppose.
- notalaser 11y ago
  > The maintainers of the free BSD's have been carrying that torch, but they don't believe in features. I used Linux for more than a decade before switching to OpenBSD precisely because Linux developers believe in features to the point where how well they're implemented is no longer relevant. The arrogant, know-it-all kids that we so lovingly nurtured in the Linux community grew up to be its forefront developers today. It shows. Edit: I was hesitant to write this because it always leads to very unproductive results, but what the hell, I'll bite. Systemd was the last straw for me, not because something something Unix philosophy (after all, OpenVMS disdained the Unix philosophy, and it worked better than Linux ever has) but because it's so bug-ridden that its interface's simplicity and elegance are next to useless. Maintaining a non-trivial network & filesystem setup (e.g. I have a few dozen Qemu VMs, because writing software for embedded systems is like that) became a nightmare. It broke with every other update. Great if you're doing devops and this is expected and part of your job, terrible if you're doing actual development and you want an infrastructure that doesn't break between compiles. I ragequit one afternoon, put FreeBSD on my workstation and OpenBSD on my laptop. I have not touched anything in my configuration in almost a year now and it works flawlessly. I don't think I've had it work for a whole month without having to fiddle with whatever the fuck broke in systemd, somethingsomethingkit or God knows what other thing bolted on top of the system via DBus. I can write code in peace now and that's all I want. These are all great technologies. Systemd in particular was something I enthusiastically used at first, precisely because after Solaris' SMF -- XML-based as it is -- even OpenRC seemed like a step back to me. But, ya know, I'd actually want it to work.
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    The basic problem, as i see it, is that the Gnome/Freedesktop people got hold of the user space reins, and turned what used to be a kernel up development process into a desktop down development process.
    - notalaser 11y ago
      I don't know if it ever was a "kernel up" development process. Gnome (and KDE) both had their own, pretty complex stack, even before Freedesktop.org came up (e.g. KDE had DCOP and a bunch of other services). And they weren't exactly bug-free, either -- but at least they covered a lot less surface. I don't think it's a simple problem, and I don't think all the blame should be laid on Freedesktop.org, where a lot of good projects originated. I do think a lot could be solved by developers being a little more modest.
tempodox 11y ago
Last I checked, a call to fgetwc(3) on Linux crashes as soon as I actually enter a non-ASCII character, with a locale of en_US.UTF-8.

by thisrod 11y ago

This reminded me of a Rob Pike comment. I can't find the text, but it was along the lines of, "I recently tried Linux. It was as if every bug I fixed in the 1980s had reverted."

kazinator 11y ago

That was baseless posturing. A famous study and its follow-up found that the utilities on GNU/Linux are more robust, and that was twenty years ago: ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/paradyn/technical_papers/fuzz-revisited.pdf [1995] "This study parallels our 1990 study (that tested only the basic UNIX utilities); all systems that we compared between 1990 and 1995 noticeably improved in reliability, but still had significant rates of failure. The reliability of the basic utilities from GNU and Linux were noticeably better than those of the commercial systems." I doubt there has been much improvement in those commercial Unixes; they are basically dead. (What would be the business case for fixing something in userland utility on commerical Unix?) The maintainers of the free BSD's have been carrying that torch, but they don't believe in features. Stepping into a BSD variant is like a trip back to the 1980's. Not exactly the real 1980's, but a parallel 1980's in which Unix is more robust---but the features are all rolled back, so it's just about as unpleasant to use.

setra 11y ago
Then the commercial systems must have been horrible. Take a look at GNU code, then at plan 9 code. Combine a few GNU core utils, and you have more code than the whole plan 9 kernel. Granted Plan 9 came out a little passed 1990.
- kazinator 11y ago
  Only by not using subordinate clauses did you just avoid saying "plan 9" and "commercial" in the same sentence! Where is Plan 9 deployed? Who are the customers? Plan 9 is a strawman representative of "commercial Unix". > Combine a few GNU core utils, and you have more code than the whole plan 9 kernel. When you actually sit down and think of the cases that can occur, that translates into code. Handle this, handle that, and the KLOC's just pile up. Speaking of kernel size, what makes a kernel code base big? Why, device drivers for lots of hardware.
  - cplease 11y ago
    Just replying to point out that the grayed out comment above is the correct one. There is ugliness in coreutils, but it mature, functional, proven ugliness. A lot of it is even there for a reason. It's not difficult to make an elegant toy in isolation.
    - setra 11y ago
      checkout the different implementations of echo across various operating systems: "https://gist.github.com/dchest/1091803" https://gist.github.com/dchest/1091803".
      - 2trill2spill 11y ago
        That link is not working for me, Github is throwing a 404.
        cjs2 11y ago
        The link has an extraneous `"` character at the end. It works fine if you remove it.
      - setra 11y ago
        Browser seem to include the end quote when clicked. It mush be removed for the url to work.
      - vinkelhake 11y ago
        I've used the -e option in GNU's echo many times. The various other versions are strictly less useful to me. Does the option really belong in echo? Who knows, but it's certainly been useful to me. UNIX fifth edition goes for absolute minimalism. Echo in Plan 9 is apparently used enough that it's worthwhile to optimize the number of times write is called. FreeBSD echo looks like someone just learned about writev. OpenBSD's seem like the sanest of the minimalists. What's the takeaway for you?
        11y ago
cokernel_hacker 11y ago
I don't think Rob meant stability. Rob was probably referring to the reality that modern Linux hasn't innovated itself past SVR4 by any appreciable amount. We are still using X, still using terminals powered by control codes, etc. Rob probably sees things like LANG and LC_ALL as bugs. His fix was UTF-8 everywhere, always. Where is Linux? Still in bag-of-bytes-o-rama.
- kazinator 11y ago
  I agree with Rob's "UTF-8 everywhere". I took this approach in the TXR language. Its I/O streams output and input UTF-8, and only that. Period. (There is no virtual switch for alternative encodings.) Internally, everything is a wide character code point. I do not call the "fuck my C program function" known as setlocale, and no behavior related to character handling or localization is influenced by magic environment strings. LANG and LC_ALL are the work of ISO C and POSIX; they are not the fault of Linux. Linux has these in the name of compliance; they were foisted upon the free word, essentially.
- SixSigma 11y ago
  That and getting rid of the TTY altogether. We aren't using punched cards EDIT: people hate when I say this, which amuses me. The TTY must die !!!!
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - nils-m-holm 11y ago
    > The TTY must die!!!! Being sight-impaired, I have to disagree strongly! The TTY is the only thing that lets me adjust the font size of all programs running in it without going through lots of trouble. (BTW: didn't downvote your comment.)
    - guard-of-terra 11y ago
      Browsers let you do that. KDE also does, so do other environments. For a quick hack, set your sceen DPI to 50.
2trill2spill 11y ago
> The maintainers of the free BSD's have been carrying that torch, but they don't believe in features. Stepping into a BSD variant is like a trip back to the 1980's. Not exactly the real 1980's, but a parallel 1980's in which Unix is more robust---but the features are all rolled back, so it's just about as unpleasant to use. Sorry but that's all BS. FreeBSD is definitely a modern system, has lot's of features and is emphatically, millions of times better than a 1980's Unix. Linux may have a larger community than the BSD's but saying the BSD's are like stepping into the 1980's is rather disingenuous.
- dijit 11y ago
  He wants; Games, SystemD, complicated control interfaces, and most of all a fully interactive desktop environment which mounts his drives for him and plays flash videos.. .. Without taking much time to configure it. This is fair enough but it's not what I want in a machine, openBSD might be "behind" but it feels complete, supported, sustainable and most of all "very well thought out". FreeBSD is also exceedingly good, but makes trade offs in how clean the implementation of the OS feels to keep up with linux. or, at least it feels like this to me. But to say the BSDs aren't modern is deluded, there's a reason they're known to have the fastest software networking stack in the world.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    I do not want any of that stuff. I found FreeBSD to be unusable simply in the command line environment. I was using only a text console login. I simply wanted a decent shell and editor. Heck, FreeBSD wouldn't even scroll back with the de facto standard Shift-PgUp. > mounts his drives for him That amazing advancement in Unix usability can be achieved by something called the "automount daemon" which was introduced in the late 1980's in SunOS (the real, pre-Solaris one). Tom Lyon developed the original automount software at Sun Microsystems: SunOS 4.0 made automounting available in 1988. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automounter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automounter] You basically just wrote a comment which paints a 1988 commercial Unix feature as a Linux frill that BSD people don't need. FreeBSD has caved in and has autofs as of 10.1: https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=autofs&sektion=5 https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=autofs&sektion=5 That was released in November 2014, only some 26 years after Sun rolled out the feature. Better late than never, I suppose.
notalaser 11y ago
> The maintainers of the free BSD's have been carrying that torch, but they don't believe in features. I used Linux for more than a decade before switching to OpenBSD precisely because Linux developers believe in features to the point where how well they're implemented is no longer relevant. The arrogant, know-it-all kids that we so lovingly nurtured in the Linux community grew up to be its forefront developers today. It shows. Edit: I was hesitant to write this because it always leads to very unproductive results, but what the hell, I'll bite. Systemd was the last straw for me, not because something something Unix philosophy (after all, OpenVMS disdained the Unix philosophy, and it worked better than Linux ever has) but because it's so bug-ridden that its interface's simplicity and elegance are next to useless. Maintaining a non-trivial network & filesystem setup (e.g. I have a few dozen Qemu VMs, because writing software for embedded systems is like that) became a nightmare. It broke with every other update. Great if you're doing devops and this is expected and part of your job, terrible if you're doing actual development and you want an infrastructure that doesn't break between compiles. I ragequit one afternoon, put FreeBSD on my workstation and OpenBSD on my laptop. I have not touched anything in my configuration in almost a year now and it works flawlessly. I don't think I've had it work for a whole month without having to fiddle with whatever the fuck broke in systemd, somethingsomethingkit or God knows what other thing bolted on top of the system via DBus. I can write code in peace now and that's all I want. These are all great technologies. Systemd in particular was something I enthusiastically used at first, precisely because after Solaris' SMF -- XML-based as it is -- even OpenRC seemed like a step back to me. But, ya know, I'd actually want it to work.
- digi_owl 11y ago
  The basic problem, as i see it, is that the Gnome/Freedesktop people got hold of the user space reins, and turned what used to be a kernel up development process into a desktop down development process.
  - notalaser 11y ago
    I don't know if it ever was a "kernel up" development process. Gnome (and KDE) both had their own, pretty complex stack, even before Freedesktop.org came up (e.g. KDE had DCOP and a bunch of other services). And they weren't exactly bug-free, either -- but at least they covered a lot less surface. I don't think it's a simple problem, and I don't think all the blame should be laid on Freedesktop.org, where a lot of good projects originated. I do think a lot could be solved by developers being a little more modest.

tempodox 11y ago

Last I checked, a call to fgetwc(3) on Linux crashes as soon as I actually enter a non-ASCII character, with a locale of en_US.UTF-8.