4 ms·

What problem is this warning trying to solve? Are these two symlinks too much maintenance burden? Or is the check in the code hurting the code quality? Is the e

What problem is this warning trying to solve? Are these two symlinks too much maintenance burden? Or is the check in the code hurting the code quality? Is the extra check at startup ruining performance? I'm usually in favour of having one way to do things but in this case, with this much legacy it just doesn't seem worth it.

roenxi 4y ago
This is free software. It is legitimate to consider convenience for the maintainers. If they don't want to maintain two symlinks then they are empowered to make that call. If anyone thinks it is a big enough problem that they want to fork the software they can, or the distros can maintain their own symlinks. But I think in this case the simple answer is if the maintainer doesn't want it in the source tarball then it isn't going to be there and that is more than sufficient a justification. Complaining is probably more reasonable than asking for a justification here.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  > It is legitimate to consider convenience for the maintainers. Yes, but the convenience of... creating 2 symlinks and adding the flag based on argv[0]? Sorry, I don't buy it. Wanting to die on such a tiny hill has GNU written all over it though
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  I don't know when society in general just said "Fuck It" to the idea of stewardship; but we now have it ingrained that people in positions of trust and power (whether volunteered, elected or appointed) are not morally or ethically beholden or responsible to the communities they have taken it upon themselves to represent. At least we used to pay lip service to that ideal.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    They didn't necessarily "choose communities to represent". As the maintainer and author of various open source libraries and tools that are used by many thousands, in most cases it's just that ... I'm one of the few willing to spend the time on it, and it's usually useful for myself as well. I don't really "represent" any community or anyone. That said, I certainly wouldn't have put in this change myself, because I wouldn't like to inconvenience anyone. But that's just basic good manners that you should have in every-day life to random strangers.
    - midislack 4y ago
      - Beltalowda 4y ago
        Well, if I write some software for my own use, put it on the internet "because why not?", and lots of people start using then that's nice. But ... I don't think putting anything on the internet automatically imparts any kind of responsibility towards "the community", which usually means "people who download and use your software, the overwhelming majority never give anything back in the form of code, bug reports, money, or anything else". But like I already said in my previous comment, I wouldn't have made this change myself. I actually strongly disagree with it. But I can also accept that other people have a different attitude, and that's okay too, even if I personally don't really care much for the particular attitude. Funny you mention OpenBSD, because OpenBSD is very much "by the developers, for the developers" and has a fairly decent "fuck off" attitude once people start making demands (which I don't think is a negative per se).
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      That's a very different thing than joining GNU. If your package gets adopted by thousands of peoples that's having this community thrust upon you. I still feel you have an obligation to transfer to someone willing to shoulder the responsibility if this happens, an obligation incurred by publishing it in the first place. Though, I don't feel too strongly about this.
      - Beltalowda 4y ago
        Jim Meyering made the change, who has been maintaining these things from before half the people here were born. Even when taking over maintainership for popular packages later on, people often aren't exactly breaking down the door for it. So my philosophy is simple: "if you do the work, you get to decide". I may like or dislike these decisions, and at times I may even rant about how stupid a certain decision is, but in the end ... the people doing the work get to decide. The alternative of being beholden to a vaguely defined "community" of armchair quarterbacks is much worse, IMO.
  - __s 4y ago
    Are you suggesting that a 15 year deprecation path is a fuck it attitude towards stewardship? Distros are free to've replaced the symlinks with wrapper scripts in the meantime. Granted, I expect Arch will go ahead & let the symlinks disappear. But I can't imagine what you think of Arch's stewardship I expect this should have about as little impact as the usr merge many distros have gone through
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      I'm replying to the attitude in the comment I'm replying to, if I meant this as a comment on GNU's approach to fgrep/egrep, it would have been top level. The original deprecation seems ... petty? Not sure why it's a priority, but whatever. I know there are scripts still in use that I wrote more than a decade ago that might do weird things now and I wish the maintainers best of luck.
  - SkyBelow 4y ago
    One major issue with humans is that sacrifice begins to be expected and often is not rewarded. When a job not only becomes thankless, or near enough, but also expected as the default, it becomes hurtful to continue doing it. Are the stewards being provided fair compensation? How do we even talk about what is fair compensation when non-monetary compensation has become difficult to even discuss (often due to past instances being extreme disproportionate or of a form that is no longer tolerable). The simplest way to put it is that if you can't find a steward you aren't paying enough and trying to use appeals to morals or ethics to get people to accept lower pay no longer holds as much weight when being moral or ethical no longer provides the same level of non-monetary benefits.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      > One major issue with humans is that sacrifice begins to be expected and often is not rewarded. When a job not only becomes thankless, or near enough, but also expected as the default, it becomes hurtful to continue doing it. Oh, most definitely. The anger and vitriol I see directed towards maintainers, or volunteers of any type, who are "stepping back for personal reasons" is horrifying. My father was a very active volunteer in his community ... the number of people who were mad at him when he stepped away after his heart problems was startling. Conversely, the number of people who volunteered to help him and my mother with shopping etc. when COVID hit was heart warming.
  - asoneth 4y ago
    > At least we used to pay lip service to that ideal. When was that? For as long as I can recall, a core mantra of free/libre software has been that it was provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Decades ago the dominant response I recall was one of gratitude and a little amazement that ad-hoc communities of volunteers were making real software that wasn't just academic but on par with commercial offerings. Some of those communities chose to adopt a user-friendly posture because they wanted people to like them but plenty did not and just did their own thing. As long as they could attract contributors they kept going. Personally what concerns me is this growing expectation that volunteering to maintain an open source project also means you are "morally or ethically beholden or responsible" to anyone who uses it. In practice that seems to mean maintainers must respond to user requests or end up on the receiving end of a great deal of vitriol. It's no wonder so many volunteer maintainers who have internalized this responsibility are burning out, and how many more potential maintainers are dissuaded by seeing what is happening to the current maintainers.
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      Well, concurrent with this decline in stewardship has been a decline in graciousness towards volunteers, so I see your point. I remember when I was younger, every volunteering experience I had was a delight; people thanking me for my time, getting me free coffee "just because", etc. Some of my more recent volunteering experiences have been less pleasant.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    This is "back in my day"-levels of lazy armchair criticism. Nothing has changed. People will always make decisions that you disagree with, and they are more likely than not doing it in a good faith attempt to benefit the community. These sorts of inflammatory and hyperbolic comments help nobody, and are just childishly over-the-top. egrep going away is not evidence of moral or ethical bankruptcy, just wow.
- colonwqbang 4y ago
  It can't be that much work to maintain a symlink. The idea that it could be less work to remove a standard feature that has been part of Unix for several decades, has no connection with reality. There is no reasonable explanation for this decision except that somebody thought that having both egrep and grep -E was "ugly" according to their own personal sensibilities.
  - AshamedCaptain 4y ago
    And this is what I hate from the argument "you can't expect the maintainers to always support the feature". No, I don't. But I do expect them NOT to regularly remove/break the features I have contributed! E.g. I can't count the number of times I have submitted _the_ _same_ _GUI_ _fixes_ to certain popular browser over the decades. Because apparently "they" have to rewrite the chrome of the mobile version from scratch every handful of years. "They" is in quotes because it's, in fairness, never the same person or even the same group of people. It's a CADT. And in this case, to remove what apparently are two small shell scripts which for sure cost more to remove than to preserve....
    - layer8 4y ago
      Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers?
- _jal 4y ago
  > It is legitimate to consider convenience for the maintainers In which case, time to fork it. I don't fucking care who you are, you do not break grep and keep a privileged position on my machine.
  - iso1631 4y ago
    Nobody is stopping you from forking it.
    - _jal 4y ago
      That's the plan. I haven't built a new package in a while, time to remember how `fpm` works. Conflicts: grep Provides: grep
- fleddr 4y ago
  What 'maintenance' goes into symlinks that already exist? The only thing one needs to do is nothing at all. It is in fact more 'maintenance' to delete them.
- MobiusHorizons 4y ago
  What exactly do you imagine the maintenance being? egrep and fgrep are already shell scripts, and those scripts haven't been edited since 2015. If not needing to change something for 7 years counts as a maintenance burden, sign me up.
tgv 4y ago
Unfortunately, this seems symptomatic of GNU's attitude: we've come up with something silly and it's going to screw some people over badly in the least agreeable moment, but we're too stubborn and proud to admit it. Take it, or buy a Windows 11 license.
barrkel 4y ago
The problem is people being wrong, and the upside is feeling good about punishing them. IMO.
saalweachter 4y ago
At a guess, it isn't actually the symlinks, it's the argument parsing they're trying to simplify. Old programs have stupidly complex argument parsing. If you can pass your arguments as "cmd foo bar path", "cmd -f bar path", "cmd -fbar path", "cmd path --foo=bar" or "fcmd bar path" and "cmdf path bar", it can be really convenient for users who can structure their commands in the way that makes the most sense for them. But it can be really frustrating to maintainers who are maintaining -- and testing! -- a thousand lines of bespoke argument parsing for a ten line function. It's really, really tempting to define a simple syntax for argument parsing, turn it into a library, and reduce your pile of shell commands to a few lines of argument configuration and a function call.
- masklinn 4y ago
  > At a guess, it isn't actually the symlinks, it's the argument parsing they're trying to simplify. There’s no parsing. GNU’s egrep and fgrep are trivial shell scripts: #!/bin/sh exec grep -E "$@"
  - saalweachter 4y ago
    Then that's a real jerk-ass move.

roenxi 4y ago

This is free software. It is legitimate to consider convenience for the maintainers. If they don't want to maintain two symlinks then they are empowered to make that call. If anyone thinks it is a big enough problem that they want to fork the software they can, or the distros can maintain their own symlinks. But I think in this case the simple answer is if the maintainer doesn't want it in the source tarball then it isn't going to be there and that is more than sufficient a justification. Complaining is probably more reasonable than asking for a justification here.

raverbashing 4y ago
> It is legitimate to consider convenience for the maintainers. Yes, but the convenience of... creating 2 symlinks and adding the flag based on argv[0]? Sorry, I don't buy it. Wanting to die on such a tiny hill has GNU written all over it though
Ensorceled 4y ago
I don't know when society in general just said "Fuck It" to the idea of stewardship; but we now have it ingrained that people in positions of trust and power (whether volunteered, elected or appointed) are not morally or ethically beholden or responsible to the communities they have taken it upon themselves to represent. At least we used to pay lip service to that ideal.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  They didn't necessarily "choose communities to represent". As the maintainer and author of various open source libraries and tools that are used by many thousands, in most cases it's just that ... I'm one of the few willing to spend the time on it, and it's usually useful for myself as well. I don't really "represent" any community or anyone. That said, I certainly wouldn't have put in this change myself, because I wouldn't like to inconvenience anyone. But that's just basic good manners that you should have in every-day life to random strangers.
  - midislack 4y ago
    - Beltalowda 4y ago
      Well, if I write some software for my own use, put it on the internet "because why not?", and lots of people start using then that's nice. But ... I don't think putting anything on the internet automatically imparts any kind of responsibility towards "the community", which usually means "people who download and use your software, the overwhelming majority never give anything back in the form of code, bug reports, money, or anything else". But like I already said in my previous comment, I wouldn't have made this change myself. I actually strongly disagree with it. But I can also accept that other people have a different attitude, and that's okay too, even if I personally don't really care much for the particular attitude. Funny you mention OpenBSD, because OpenBSD is very much "by the developers, for the developers" and has a fairly decent "fuck off" attitude once people start making demands (which I don't think is a negative per se).
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    That's a very different thing than joining GNU. If your package gets adopted by thousands of peoples that's having this community thrust upon you. I still feel you have an obligation to transfer to someone willing to shoulder the responsibility if this happens, an obligation incurred by publishing it in the first place. Though, I don't feel too strongly about this.
    - Beltalowda 4y ago
      Jim Meyering made the change, who has been maintaining these things from before half the people here were born. Even when taking over maintainership for popular packages later on, people often aren't exactly breaking down the door for it. So my philosophy is simple: "if you do the work, you get to decide". I may like or dislike these decisions, and at times I may even rant about how stupid a certain decision is, but in the end ... the people doing the work get to decide. The alternative of being beholden to a vaguely defined "community" of armchair quarterbacks is much worse, IMO.
- __s 4y ago
  Are you suggesting that a 15 year deprecation path is a fuck it attitude towards stewardship? Distros are free to've replaced the symlinks with wrapper scripts in the meantime. Granted, I expect Arch will go ahead & let the symlinks disappear. But I can't imagine what you think of Arch's stewardship I expect this should have about as little impact as the usr merge many distros have gone through
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    I'm replying to the attitude in the comment I'm replying to, if I meant this as a comment on GNU's approach to fgrep/egrep, it would have been top level. The original deprecation seems ... petty? Not sure why it's a priority, but whatever. I know there are scripts still in use that I wrote more than a decade ago that might do weird things now and I wish the maintainers best of luck.
- SkyBelow 4y ago
  One major issue with humans is that sacrifice begins to be expected and often is not rewarded. When a job not only becomes thankless, or near enough, but also expected as the default, it becomes hurtful to continue doing it. Are the stewards being provided fair compensation? How do we even talk about what is fair compensation when non-monetary compensation has become difficult to even discuss (often due to past instances being extreme disproportionate or of a form that is no longer tolerable). The simplest way to put it is that if you can't find a steward you aren't paying enough and trying to use appeals to morals or ethics to get people to accept lower pay no longer holds as much weight when being moral or ethical no longer provides the same level of non-monetary benefits.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    > One major issue with humans is that sacrifice begins to be expected and often is not rewarded. When a job not only becomes thankless, or near enough, but also expected as the default, it becomes hurtful to continue doing it. Oh, most definitely. The anger and vitriol I see directed towards maintainers, or volunteers of any type, who are "stepping back for personal reasons" is horrifying. My father was a very active volunteer in his community ... the number of people who were mad at him when he stepped away after his heart problems was startling. Conversely, the number of people who volunteered to help him and my mother with shopping etc. when COVID hit was heart warming.
- asoneth 4y ago
  > At least we used to pay lip service to that ideal. When was that? For as long as I can recall, a core mantra of free/libre software has been that it was provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Decades ago the dominant response I recall was one of gratitude and a little amazement that ad-hoc communities of volunteers were making real software that wasn't just academic but on par with commercial offerings. Some of those communities chose to adopt a user-friendly posture because they wanted people to like them but plenty did not and just did their own thing. As long as they could attract contributors they kept going. Personally what concerns me is this growing expectation that volunteering to maintain an open source project also means you are "morally or ethically beholden or responsible" to anyone who uses it. In practice that seems to mean maintainers must respond to user requests or end up on the receiving end of a great deal of vitriol. It's no wonder so many volunteer maintainers who have internalized this responsibility are burning out, and how many more potential maintainers are dissuaded by seeing what is happening to the current maintainers.
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    Well, concurrent with this decline in stewardship has been a decline in graciousness towards volunteers, so I see your point. I remember when I was younger, every volunteering experience I had was a delight; people thanking me for my time, getting me free coffee "just because", etc. Some of my more recent volunteering experiences have been less pleasant.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- phailhaus 4y ago
  This is "back in my day"-levels of lazy armchair criticism. Nothing has changed. People will always make decisions that you disagree with, and they are more likely than not doing it in a good faith attempt to benefit the community. These sorts of inflammatory and hyperbolic comments help nobody, and are just childishly over-the-top. egrep going away is not evidence of moral or ethical bankruptcy, just wow.
colonwqbang 4y ago
It can't be that much work to maintain a symlink. The idea that it could be less work to remove a standard feature that has been part of Unix for several decades, has no connection with reality. There is no reasonable explanation for this decision except that somebody thought that having both egrep and grep -E was "ugly" according to their own personal sensibilities.
- AshamedCaptain 4y ago
  And this is what I hate from the argument "you can't expect the maintainers to always support the feature". No, I don't. But I do expect them NOT to regularly remove/break the features I have contributed! E.g. I can't count the number of times I have submitted _the_ _same_ _GUI_ _fixes_ to certain popular browser over the decades. Because apparently "they" have to rewrite the chrome of the mobile version from scratch every handful of years. "They" is in quotes because it's, in fairness, never the same person or even the same group of people. It's a CADT. And in this case, to remove what apparently are two small shell scripts which for sure cost more to remove than to preserve....
  - layer8 4y ago
    Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers?
_jal 4y ago
> It is legitimate to consider convenience for the maintainers In which case, time to fork it. I don't fucking care who you are, you do not break grep and keep a privileged position on my machine.
- iso1631 4y ago
  Nobody is stopping you from forking it.
  - _jal 4y ago
    That's the plan. I haven't built a new package in a while, time to remember how `fpm` works. Conflicts: grep Provides: grep
fleddr 4y ago
What 'maintenance' goes into symlinks that already exist? The only thing one needs to do is nothing at all. It is in fact more 'maintenance' to delete them.
MobiusHorizons 4y ago
What exactly do you imagine the maintenance being? egrep and fgrep are already shell scripts, and those scripts haven't been edited since 2015. If not needing to change something for 7 years counts as a maintenance burden, sign me up.

tgv 4y ago

Unfortunately, this seems symptomatic of GNU's attitude: we've come up with something silly and it's going to screw some people over badly in the least agreeable moment, but we're too stubborn and proud to admit it. Take it, or buy a Windows 11 license.

barrkel 4y ago

The problem is people being wrong, and the upside is feeling good about punishing them. IMO.

saalweachter 4y ago

At a guess, it isn't actually the symlinks, it's the argument parsing they're trying to simplify. Old programs have stupidly complex argument parsing. If you can pass your arguments as "cmd foo bar path", "cmd -f bar path", "cmd -fbar path", "cmd path --foo=bar" or "fcmd bar path" and "cmdf path bar", it can be really convenient for users who can structure their commands in the way that makes the most sense for them. But it can be really frustrating to maintainers who are maintaining -- and testing! -- a thousand lines of bespoke argument parsing for a ten line function. It's really, really tempting to define a simple syntax for argument parsing, turn it into a library, and reduce your pile of shell commands to a few lines of argument configuration and a function call.

masklinn 4y ago
> At a guess, it isn't actually the symlinks, it's the argument parsing they're trying to simplify. There’s no parsing. GNU’s egrep and fgrep are trivial shell scripts: #!/bin/sh exec grep -E "$@"
- saalweachter 4y ago
  Then that's a real jerk-ass move.