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>For example: --some-long-option comes to mind, or lack of proper manual pages ("see the texinfo page"), What are you even talking about here? man/info works w

• Annatar 10y ago
  Manual pages on traditional UNIX systems are extremely detailed and contain lots of good, usable examples, and Solaris / illumos based operating systems really shine in this area. People who grew up on a real UNIX expect to find comprehensive, high quality documentation in the manual pages in a terminal session. This feature was driven hard by enterprise customers and professional system administrators in times when wikis did not exist, and even today the quality of the content in some arbitrary wiki written by someone on the internet when they felt like it is dubious in comparison to manual pages written by people with formal education in engineering and technical writing! Like I wrote before, on UNIX we have different expectations in different areas than what people are used to and accept as given on Linux. The focus is different on UNIX. Apropos dbx versus gdb: dbx has a 1,000 page manual, and makes it really easy to step through assembler code while listing the original source. How many pages of documentation does gdb have again? On top of that, gdb doesn't even fully support my OS, I don't think gdb properly supports anything that is not Linux... hmmm, that reminds me an awful lot of Microsoft Windows monoculture. systemd versus SMF: systemd is a shoddy copy of SMF with a Windows twist, trying to replace every service in the system. Unlike SMF, which is part of the fault management architecture, which is part of self-healing technology, systemd has no such concept, self-healing and a contract filesystem is science fiction for systemd. SMF watches over services, but it doesn't try to replace them; "do one thing, and do it well." InfiniBand is a different technology than fiberchannel.
  • figgis 10y ago
    To get full GDB documentation you need to use info gdb, the man page states that itself. Man pages are quite limited correct, so they offered a better solution just like what you are looking for... Not sure what the issue is here. The amount of documentation is massive, 2321 lines of text in an easy to browse format... GDB also works on a large amount of computers. Windows, Linux, netbsd, etc. >>>However, its use is not strictly limited to the GNU operating system; it is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Free Pascal, Fortran, Java[1] and partially others. [0] >hmmm, that reminds me an awful lot of Microsoft Windows monoculture. What? Actually they support windows, which is exactly the opposite of what you are trying to say here... I use GDB DAILY on windows (work.) with zero issues. I'll agree that perhaps systemd doesn't cover all use cases or wants. But calling it a shoddy copy of SMF with a windows twist is disingenuous. I don't care for the for or against systemd arguments but after the initial reaction/learning phase when pulling away from upstart/sysv/init based shit/etc, many of us are actually starting to warm up to systemd. It handles services wonderfully, it handles logs wonderfully, perhaps it's a bit bloated whatever you can always revert to what you want if you decide to spend the time to actually do it. >InfiniBand is a different technology than fiberchannel. Fair enough, i'll have to read up more on it than. You are making quite a lot of generalizations without doing proper research. If you want to be stuck in your "In the old days us Unix people had it right!" mindset than this discussion is pointless. Otherwise I would love to continue butting heads on this. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Debugger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Debugger
    • Annatar 10y ago
      > To get full GDB documentation you need to use info gdb, the man page states that itself. Man pages are quite limited correct, `info gdb` is completely unacceptable, and an outrage: standard documentation on UNIX are manual pages, not to mention that systems other than GNU/Linux do not use GNU info. > Man pages are quite limited correct, Incorrect; manual pages are rendered by the nroff document typesetting system. Entire books have been typeset for printing with nroff. Case in point: the UNIX Text Processing book, the AWK book, the ANSI C book. The system is extremely flexible and very powerful, once one understands what is going on. When you hold the printed versions of these books in your hand, you can see that they are beautifully typeset and rendered. Brought to you by the same programs which render UNIX manual pages when you type `man some_command`! What you see on the screen (on UNIX, cannot vouch for Linux) when you type `man ls` is an actual professional typesetting system rendering the content for stdout instead of a printing press! > I don't care for the for or against systemd arguments but after the initial reaction/learning phase when pulling away from upstart/sysv/init based shit/etc, many of us are actually starting to warm up to systemd. That's because you haven't had the opportunity to enjoy SMF. When you've worked with SMF, systemd looks like a cobbled-together toy. For example, systemd turns ASCII logs into binary format, just like on Windows. This in turn goes against the UNIX philosophy of Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. [McIlroy] http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html > You are making quite a lot of generalizations without doing proper research. That's is quite ironic, telling that to someone who does professional system engineering and software development on GNU/Linux for a living. I have been doing UNIX and Linux professsionally since 1993, and working with computers in general since 1984, how many years is that? I spend every waking moment of what free time I have researching UNIX and Linux. To tell me that I'm "generalizing without doing proper research" just because I am not succumbing to GNU/Linux group think is what one could call disingenuous.