Re: View on UNIX purism in Linux Community
On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 20:32:45 +0200
Bartosz Olender <bartek.olender@gmail.com> wrote:
> W dniu 15.09.2014 19:39, Joe pisze:
> > On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 11:07:35 -0400
> > Doug <dmcgarrett@optonline.net> wrote:
> >
> >> On 09/15/2014 03:31 AM, saint@eng.it wrote:
> >>> Bartosz Olender writes:
> >>> > Therefore I want to poke my three cents into this discussion
> >>> > reminding that "GNU is *Not* Unix"
> >>>
> >>> May I recall that most of the systemd-haters knows the recursive
> >>> expansion of GNU?
> >>>
> >>
> >> Most of us are no interested in what Stallman or whoever created
> >> back in 1995. We don't think of Linux as GNU. Linux is much more
> >> Unix than anything else. And it certainly is _not_ what GNU was
> >> back then.
> >>
> >> I don't like to get involved in this dumb tirade, but the GNU
> >> business grates on me!
> >>
> >
> > It's all irrelevant. Bad programming practice is bad programming
> > practice, wherever and however it occurs. Bad programming practice
> > can be acceptable if it brings benefits large enough to outweigh the
> > badness.
> >
>
> I am not defending systemd programmers but, could you clarify what do
> you exactly mean by bad programming practices?
>
In this case, I wasn't really being specific, just pointing out that
names like GNU and Unix don't imply any monopoly on good or bad
programming, nor necessarily any restriction on where Debian and
other Linux distributions go. Vital as Stallman's tools were to begin
the process, Linux and other Unix derivatives have moved beyond the
point where it is either Stallman's way or commercial Unix's way. They
have, at the moment at least, a life of their own.
But specifically here, any dependency that isn't genuinely and
functionally necessary is inherently a bad idea. Always, though
sometimes the alternatives are worse. It is what OO programming was
created to minimise. Something intended to interact with a wide range
of other software should need no detailed knowledge of that software,
and vice versa, other a button or two in one part which is pressed by
the other.
The battle between monolithic, centrally-controlled IT systems and
mostly-autonomous distributed systems is long over, in terms of
reliability and resilience. The idea that you could throw together a
few hundred building blocks of Windows, out of a choice of thousands,
and still have a stable and reliable operating system is laughable, yet
at the moment we can do this with Linux.
But this has all been well-discussed, and the issue here in Debian-user
is how the decisions already made will affect Debian, and whether the
apparent default roadmap is the only one, or the most desirable, or
whether it can actually be avoided by individuals, or whether Debian
should make any effort to accommodate people who don't want to go with
the flow.
--
Joe
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