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Rather bizarre logic regarding unit tests. Surely the correct thing to do is to add telemetry to the application to get metrics on feature usage. Of course thi
by paol 10y ago
Rather bizarre logic regarding unit tests. Surely the correct thing to do is to add telemetry to the application to get metrics on feature usage.
Of course this may not be practical for small utilities, like ls in the example. By the way ls -p (well, -F actually) was quite useful in the time before coloured output. I remember it being turned on by default on some systems I used way back when.
- masklinn 10y ago> Of course this may not be practical for small utilities It's utterly undoable for utilities (small or not) even if you ignore the likely blowback à la W10 telemetry.
- paol 10y agoLots of large applications have extensive telemetry without any significant blowback (as far as I'm aware). MS Office, Firefox, Chrome, ... It's not undoable for utilities either, just the effort/benefit ratio probably doesn't justify it.
- masklinn 10y ago> Lots of large applications have extensive telemetry without any significant blowback (as far as I'm aware). MS Office, Firefox, Chrome, ... Not sure about the others, but AFAIK Firefox telemetry is only enabled (or at least sent to Mozilla) on pre-release channels. > It's not undoable for utilities either It's undoable in the sense that you'll be bundling more telemetry code than there is actual utility code, and downstream is going to remove it as soon as it lands.
- vertex-four 10y agoFirefox Health Report is on and shared with Mozilla by default on release builds - it prompts you about it on first run. There's additional telemetry in pre-release builds.
- cm3 10y agols -p and -F are still useful. Removing -p and -F is similar to removing 3d widgets from user interfaces and then wondering why users don't know what is an interactive ui element in modern UIs (which happen to look like Windows 1.0). I won't understand the desire to shuffle things around just to make things seem fresh, mostly user interfaces but other things too. Emacs is a good example what stable interfaces can get you. Users have been carrying around their ~/.emacs.d for 30 years and it's working on their Raspberry Pi just like it did on HPUX.
- reacweb 10y agoBefore colors, "ls -F" was often used. I have only seen "ls -p" in scripts. I think the command "du -ch `ls -p| grep -v '/'`|tail -1" is a typical use case.
- forgottenpass 10y agoSurely the correct thing to do is to add telemetry to the application to get metrics on feature usage. And when the popularity of feature X happens to correlate with people running in environments that don't let the tool phone home through their default-deny traffic filters? Fuck them and their use case for not letting you monitor ever little thing?
- numbsafari 10y agoMaybe they could bake a warning about the use of deprecated features into the default MOTD or some other system alert? Something like: "Hey, we are considering deprecating 'ls -P' and detected its use by your system. We'd love to work with you to ensure a smooth transition, check out 'man depwarn3754' for details on how you can help." The man page could include a notice about why they want to deprecate it, how you can get away from using it, and, how to contact them if you think it's an issue. It'd be a lot of leg work, that's for sure.
- rhinoceraptor 10y agoIt would get annoying really fast if every program decided to do that.