I'm not sure the paper-like presentation of the article shows that the author was in pure discovery mode, eager to share something new and interesting. My mess

I'm not sure the paper-like presentation of the article shows that the author was in pure discovery mode, eager to share something new and interesting. My message is an echo to earlier comments of earlier posts that talked about a similar point: nothing is ever new, everything has already been done before. If we tell ourselves we're engineers, we should be studying what came before in order to prove that the new thing is indeed better. That being said, recutils is the standard method of recording data in GNU, and ndb is the standard method of configuring stuff in Plan 9, a system that any proponent of UNIX mindset should know about. I'm not exactly talking about obscure stuff here.