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   Steve Bellovin (stevebellovin@infosec.exchange)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 11:17:58 JST Steve Bellovin

   A rant in two parts. This is part one…
   The discussion earlier today about systemd replacing /var/log with some dedicated facility and a special command, journalctl, to query it impelled me to write up just what I think is wrong with a lot of Linux. Basically, they've given up on the Unix philosophy of small, composable, generally usable but simple tools in favor of a mass of large, specialized tools. "They've paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.”
   Why specify a pager instead of just piping the output to a pager? Being able to search on a specific field is nice, but grep can do that. Maybe grep should be enhanced to say “apply the RE to fields m..n” (which is easy enough with awk anyway), and arguably it could take a file giving mappings of a fieldname to a field number. That's a generally useful tool; why limit it to systemd log files? Searching by time is nice, but it's nice in other contexts, e.g., the output of 'ls -l' on a large directory. The same goes for json-style output: why limit it to this context? (I won't even rant about why there has to be a single-line vs. multiline json option—that could also be a pair of simple, general commands.)
   Too many Linux subsystems (or rather, their authors) have decided that they are the world and have to provide lots of functionality specific to that subsystem, rather than building general tools. Steve Jobs once said of Windows, “The only problem with Microsoft is that they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste.” That's what's going on here.

   • Chucho :artix: repeated this.
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     Garrett Wollman (wollman@mastodon.social)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 11:17:57 JST Garrett Wollman

     in reply to

     @SteveBellovin Re: JSON, back in the days when XML was The Hot Thing, Juniper needed a way for existing normal FreeBSD command-line tools to generate XML output, so they created a library (libxo, for Xml Output) which is like "structured printf", and added standard command-line options to invoke it. Then when JSON became The New Hot Thing, it was just one change in the library to add it as a new format. FreeBSD has shipped this for eight years now, with additional utilities converted over time.

     feld likes this.
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     feld (feld@friedcheese.us)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 11:20:54 JST feld

     in reply to

     • Garrett Wollman
     @wollman @SteveBellovin I made a cron job on my firewall that spits out the IPv6 neighbors in JSON format and POSTed to an internal API with this so I can generate IPv6 related DNS records as my firewall is only doing router advertisements, not DHCPv6
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     💞 eva 💞 (winterschon@mastodon.bsd.cafe)'s status on Sunday, 22-Dec-2024 18:30:52 JST 💞 eva 💞

     in reply to

     • mms :runbsd: + :emacs: :vim:

     @SteveBellovin @mms correct on all points. every single claim that systemd proponents make to its benefit is already an existing tool or command or method which has existed in Unix and BSDs (and to a lesser extent in pre-systemd Linux distros).

     having been professionally involved with all of the major non-windows OS's for over a decade longer than systemd has existed, I can assuredly say that far too many of those claims exist simply due to the claimants vast inexperience with operating system design and engineering. they don't even know, and seemingly don't care, that we never needed systemd, and the vast majority never wanted it.

     it's no coincidence that systemd was forced into the Linux communities at the same time that MSFT stopped trying to crush it from beyond -- instead that was the very same era in which they began their assaults on open source via "embrace extend extinguish".

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     Henning Paul DC4HP (hennichodernich@radiosocial.de)'s status on Monday, 23-Dec-2024 02:36:34 JST Henning Paul DC4HP

     in reply to

     • Chuck

     @ChuckMcManis @SteveBellovin I would rather say, they're completing the work Sun started with Solaris. systemd isn't a clone of Windows' services, systemd is a clone of Solaris' svcs.

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     Chuck (chuckmcmanis@chaos.social)'s status on Monday, 23-Dec-2024 02:36:35 JST Chuck

     in reply to

     @SteveBellovin The Steve Jobs quote is spot on. The Linux 'user land' developers do not want "Unix" architecture for free they want "Windows" architecture for free. They learned to program on windows, they grew up using windows, they "get" windows, they "want" windows but without the gatekeeping of Microsoft.

     Once you understand *that*, you understand systemd and all of the other tasteless things that have become part of distributions.