3 ms·

This almost seems like a generational clash. Anybody who's been around for a while knows that you never ever type rm -rf .* because it can blow up in your

This almost seems like a generational clash. Anybody who's been around for a while knows that you never ever type rm -rf .* because it can blow up in your face. Lennart's response is tone-deaf because he can't understand how anybody could make that mistake. He's never noticed that rm has started refusing to let you shoot yourself in the foot because he would never think of typing rm -rf .* in the first place. Newer users have never had the opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot with rm and are now tripping over systemd. For all the criticism of systemd not being unixy, this bug reproduces classic unix behavior! edit: unintentional italics

prbly_banned 10y ago
I don't think Lennart is from a generation that would have experienced this. http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/rm.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/rm.... "The rm utility is forbidden to remove the names dot and dot-dot in order to avoid the consequences of inadvertently doing ..."
- sevensor 10y ago
  Please bear in mind that (1) the existence of a standard does not imply immediate global compliance of new software and (2) the existence of compliant software does not imply that people are actually using it. In the 1990s, when Lennart would have been at university, he would have been exposed to Unix servers that had been installed 5-10 years previously, at least. So the timeframe we're looking at isn't 2001, but the late 1980s / early 1990s.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    If he is programming for _nix, but has not kept himself current with developments within the _nix ecosystem, that is even more worrying.
    - sevensor 10y ago
      My sympathy is clearly with Lennart here -- we're around the same age, and I like using systemd. I came of age using systems that would absolutely burn you if you tried to remove .* and it's pretty unreasonable to ask me to remember that most users wouldn't have a reason to reflexively avoid it. You're on much firmer ground arguing that Lennart shouldn't be reimplementing rm. I disagree -- I don't have a problem with him reimplementing rm in systemd -- but there's a legitimate argument to be made there.
digi_owl 10y ago
Nah, it is more a clash in that not only do the systemd devs feel the need to make their own rm equivalent. But they fail to look into the evolution of defaults for said command before going "its unix, deal with it". Yeah it is unix, it is the kind of unix that you only find running on some old DEC somewhere. Not on a modern x86 cluster. This while presenting systemd as being about making Linux something more than a unix clone. And when people complain about systemd not being unix, it is about how everything is blobbed together via interfaces that keep changing at the whim of the developers. This in contrast to how someone can pipe the output of a GNU command to the input of a BSD command and get sane results, because the interfaces are known and fixed. People would be much more accommodating of systemd if the logind part could be used independently of the init part etc.
- majewsky 10y ago
  FWIW, the bug was fixed before Lennart even started the whole discussion. > it is more a clash in that not only do the systemd devs feel the need to make their own rm equivalent I disagree. It's a failure of the C standard library to not provide a recursive unlink(), so every C program that wishes to do one has to reimplement the logic manually. Most standard libraries of other languages have a recursive unlink(), for example: https://golang.org/pkg/os/#RemoveAll https://golang.org/pkg/os/#RemoveAll

prbly_banned 10y ago

I don't think Lennart is from a generation that would have experienced this. http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/rm.html http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/rm.... "The rm utility is forbidden to remove the names dot and dot-dot in order to avoid the consequences of inadvertently doing ..."

sevensor 10y ago
Please bear in mind that (1) the existence of a standard does not imply immediate global compliance of new software and (2) the existence of compliant software does not imply that people are actually using it. In the 1990s, when Lennart would have been at university, he would have been exposed to Unix servers that had been installed 5-10 years previously, at least. So the timeframe we're looking at isn't 2001, but the late 1980s / early 1990s.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  If he is programming for _nix, but has not kept himself current with developments within the _nix ecosystem, that is even more worrying.
  - sevensor 10y ago
    My sympathy is clearly with Lennart here -- we're around the same age, and I like using systemd. I came of age using systems that would absolutely burn you if you tried to remove .* and it's pretty unreasonable to ask me to remember that most users wouldn't have a reason to reflexively avoid it. You're on much firmer ground arguing that Lennart shouldn't be reimplementing rm. I disagree -- I don't have a problem with him reimplementing rm in systemd -- but there's a legitimate argument to be made there.

digi_owl 10y ago

Nah, it is more a clash in that not only do the systemd devs feel the need to make their own rm equivalent. But they fail to look into the evolution of defaults for said command before going "its unix, deal with it". Yeah it is unix, it is the kind of unix that you only find running on some old DEC somewhere. Not on a modern x86 cluster. This while presenting systemd as being about making Linux something more than a unix clone. And when people complain about systemd not being unix, it is about how everything is blobbed together via interfaces that keep changing at the whim of the developers. This in contrast to how someone can pipe the output of a GNU command to the input of a BSD command and get sane results, because the interfaces are known and fixed. People would be much more accommodating of systemd if the logind part could be used independently of the init part etc.

majewsky 10y ago
FWIW, the bug was fixed before Lennart even started the whole discussion. > it is more a clash in that not only do the systemd devs feel the need to make their own rm equivalent I disagree. It's a failure of the C standard library to not provide a recursive unlink(), so every C program that wishes to do one has to reimplement the logic manually. Most standard libraries of other languages have a recursive unlink(), for example: https://golang.org/pkg/os/#RemoveAll https://golang.org/pkg/os/#RemoveAll