On 26/03/2021 15:41, Susmita/Rajib wrote:
Even the book that I have procured — The Linux Command Line, A Complete Introduction, by William Shotts — has all codes spread (or sprewn) across many pages and has to be brought together by exhaustive note taking. It is clearly noticed that wide applications of tricks with wildcards, regex and redirections aren't simply available in the man pages.
You are stirring the water around pool of ancient snakes here. There is a lot of outdated engineering in Debian, indeed. Some software is frozen in time (enjoy you sh compatibility forever).Some use old-school approach of garbage in garbage out (which makes error debugging a nightmare, if few of those 'garbage out' things stacked on each other).
There are a very magical defaults in core pieces (like `debian/rules` with magical `%:\n dh $@`), and if you dig deep enough, you'll find a perl script with assumptions which are no longer completely valid, and some regex magic for things you've expected to be precisely parsed.
It's all there.But it's all software. Debian can't change sh to be 'not sh'. And any changes in a build stack are touching vast amount of software with extremely complex use-cases, so it's almost impossible to 'replace'. You can 'add' a new one, but it just make xkcd #927.
Said all that, it's the most comprehensive operating system I saw. Yes, it has old pieces (all OSes have), but general cleanness of the goal and quality of the execution made it worth tolerating those outdated pieces.
But more docs are the most welcomed thing to have.