3 ms·

Sounds pretty cool and everybody who had to learn bash scripting at some point understands why we need a sane language (my favorite are misplaced spaces in if s

by JepZ 9y ago

Sounds pretty cool and everybody who had to learn bash scripting at some point understands why we need a sane language (my favorite are misplaced spaces in if statements...; Disclaimer: I do and love bash scripting but while the language has cool concepts, some things are just broken by design). Nevertheless, there is one piece in this puzzle I am missing. There does not seem to be a process which manages the 'core software set' across platforms. So after decades we finally have a shell which is available on most operating systems, but how long will it take before Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, etc. will adopt a new shell? So why don't the large OS corporations form a consortium to define something like a 'cross platform run time environment' standard (maybe together with the Linux Foundation and some BSD guys?). I mean its not so much about which shell someone prefers, but more about a common set of interpreters and maybe tool kits. And even more than that it is not about the state but the process/progress. What do you think, do we need such a process or is there another way to solve the cross platform dilemma?

webreac 9y ago
bash is good enough for launching commands and short scripts. When you want to manipulate data that may contain special characters or write not trivial algorithms, it becomes insane. I think it is a feature. It indicates that bash is not the good tool for that. bash, sed, awk are excellent tools. I know all the basic stuff about them and I know when it becomes tricky. When it becomes tricky, I switch to python or perl.
sedachv 9y ago
What you are describing has been around since the late 1980s, IEEE POSIX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX
- JepZ 9y ago
  Well, POSIX is pretty similar to what I mean, but it has a lot of low level stuff and I doubt that Microsoft has any ambitions to transform Windows into a POSIX compatible OS. I thought more about a higher level standard like adding Python, Lua or Qt to every installation by default. As some of those things are pretty heavy I doubt that it would be a wise choice to include them in POSIX. Just imagine a world were you could simply write a small python script which would start a complete GUI application on different platforms without any additional installation procedures. To my knowledge that is not possible today. AFAIK the only way today is to bundle the dependencies, but that has a lot of negative effects.
  - jiggunjer 9y ago
    Isn't that what electron is popular for?
    - JepZ 9y ago
      Yes, that's what everybody uses electron for, because the use-case is obviously there. But everybody who has build an electron app and a Qt/GTK app, will agree that the tool kits which are available to electron apps are not as sophisticated as Qt/GTK (not talking about the ton of downsides of electron apps (huge app size, outdated versions, etc.)). I am completely pro PWA, but as far as I can see it it will take a few more years (at least) before we will get to a state which will allow us to use them in the same way we develop and use normal desktop apps nowadays.
  - JdeBP 9y ago
    > I doubt that Microsoft has any ambitions to transform Windows into a POSIX compatible OS. Windows NT already is, and has been for many years. It has had two POSIX subsystems over the years, and then a Linux subsystem.
chubot 9y ago
I've been thinking about related issues. Probably the first cut will be an "app bundle" format for Oil + busybox + arbitrary user utilities. I'm more interested in the subset of busybox that is PORTABLE. busybox doesn't run on BSDs, because a lot of it is tied to the Linux kernel. It's more for embedded Linux. I actually worked on the toybox project around when starting Oil (toybox is the "busybox" on Android, started by the former busybox maintainer Rob Landley.) So I don't want to necessarily create another package manager, which is sort of implied by your question (?). For shell, the package manager is traditionally the system one -- "apt-get" on Debian, maybe homebrew on Mac, etc. But I definitely want to solve the dependency problem, and I think the best way to do that is through some kind of support for app bundles. Of course you can also create a container image if you like.

by JepZ 9y ago

webreac 9y ago

bash is good enough for launching commands and short scripts. When you want to manipulate data that may contain special characters or write not trivial algorithms, it becomes insane. I think it is a feature. It indicates that bash is not the good tool for that. bash, sed, awk are excellent tools. I know all the basic stuff about them and I know when it becomes tricky. When it becomes tricky, I switch to python or perl.

sedachv 9y ago

What you are describing has been around since the late 1980s, IEEE POSIX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX

JepZ 9y ago
Well, POSIX is pretty similar to what I mean, but it has a lot of low level stuff and I doubt that Microsoft has any ambitions to transform Windows into a POSIX compatible OS. I thought more about a higher level standard like adding Python, Lua or Qt to every installation by default. As some of those things are pretty heavy I doubt that it would be a wise choice to include them in POSIX. Just imagine a world were you could simply write a small python script which would start a complete GUI application on different platforms without any additional installation procedures. To my knowledge that is not possible today. AFAIK the only way today is to bundle the dependencies, but that has a lot of negative effects.
- jiggunjer 9y ago
  Isn't that what electron is popular for?
  - JepZ 9y ago
    Yes, that's what everybody uses electron for, because the use-case is obviously there. But everybody who has build an electron app and a Qt/GTK app, will agree that the tool kits which are available to electron apps are not as sophisticated as Qt/GTK (not talking about the ton of downsides of electron apps (huge app size, outdated versions, etc.)). I am completely pro PWA, but as far as I can see it it will take a few more years (at least) before we will get to a state which will allow us to use them in the same way we develop and use normal desktop apps nowadays.
- JdeBP 9y ago
  > I doubt that Microsoft has any ambitions to transform Windows into a POSIX compatible OS. Windows NT already is, and has been for many years. It has had two POSIX subsystems over the years, and then a Linux subsystem.

chubot 9y ago

I've been thinking about related issues. Probably the first cut will be an "app bundle" format for Oil + busybox + arbitrary user utilities. I'm more interested in the subset of busybox that is PORTABLE. busybox doesn't run on BSDs, because a lot of it is tied to the Linux kernel. It's more for embedded Linux. I actually worked on the toybox project around when starting Oil (toybox is the "busybox" on Android, started by the former busybox maintainer Rob Landley.) So I don't want to necessarily create another package manager, which is sort of implied by your question (?). For shell, the package manager is traditionally the system one -- "apt-get" on Debian, maybe homebrew on Mac, etc. But I definitely want to solve the dependency problem, and I think the best way to do that is through some kind of support for app bundles. Of course you can also create a container image if you like.