3 ms·

Can you tell me exactly when text files have started being "crappy"?

• xroche 12y ago
  "Crappy" in the sense that every piece of network has its own file format, which is parsed by different tools. But the worst part is probably init scripts. $ wc -l /etc/init.d/smartd 653 /etc/init.d/smartd 653 lines of code to start a demon, because of the differences between all distros. Guys, seriously ?
  • vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    It's actually because of, I'm sorry to put it so bluntly, distribution maintainer incompetence in the form of not modularizing common script functions, bolting on hacks like start-stop-daemon, startpar and insserv to achieve primitive asynchronicity and service dependencies, and to an extent the failings of sysvinit itself with providing little tools to contain the environment and enforcing messy symlink farms. What you're doing is the equivalent of looking at some old Mach performance statistics and concluding that microkernels cannot possibly work... never mind there's one alongside every smartphone.
• coldtea 12y ago
  Around 1998 or so. They always were an incompatible mess of differing configuration formats, "standards" and kludges, but it was ok for the first 2-3 decades of UNIX...