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"Unix philosophy" seems to be one of those phrases that everyone likes agreeing with because you can use it to either justify or condemn anything you like. E.g
by SEMW 12y ago
"Unix philosophy" seems to be one of those phrases that everyone likes agreeing with because you can use it to either justify or condemn anything you like.
E.g. you could perfectly plausibly make the argument that systemd's return to inetd-style service starting (on-demand and in-parallel through socket activation) is a lot more unix-philosophy-like than the SysVinit way.
- cturner 12y agoAgree, but SysV-init isn't notably unixy. In general, SysV distros raced to embrace and extend away from the mainstream. That created lots of un-unixy subsystems that live on in linux. Quick wave in the direction of three - NFS, wacky IPC systems, SysVinit. SysVinit is complicated - it wants to be a DSL but is still a shell hack-together. It's inflexible - it's a dependency tracking system, but you can't easily adapt it for userspace launch control, or as a build tool. It doesn't do one thing well. (e.g. doesn't reliably contain a process tree, there are still situations where you want to use pid files or complicated ps greps). Init is a hard problem. From what I can see all the unix derivatives have made a mess of it. I've had fleeting attempts at writing my own, and I definitely made mess. In the absence of the good, I reckon the simple becomes the standard. In modern BSDs there's a script called init, it gets called at startup and does nothing for you. I reckon we should judge challengers to init against that.
- burke 12y agoIt's like a modern-day "no true scotsman": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman