We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)

Post by rgoulter » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #50

chriswarbo wrote: post #37

I get the annoyance, for both the GNU maintainers and distro maintainers/sysadmins. I'm not too wedded to either outcome, but my take is that we should avoid global mutable state: - If you're relying on random globals (like the path /usr/bin/egrep) to (a) exist and (b) behave in a certain way, then don't mutate them. Stick with known-good versions, and treat updates like any other code change (review, test, etc.). Th…

Both of your suggestions are basically equivalent to "think before you upgrade" and/or "don't upgrade". This is the second elephant in the room with all these distros that "don't use globals" and/or statically link everything (or do an analogue to that, like nix). There's very little benefit for desktops. So the upgrade to dependency X breaks component Y, and you are forced not to update X, or at least, Y's copy of X…

Post by Beltalowda » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #111

Beltalowda wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it can be solved; no one claimed you can't. The choice here is: - Thousands of users have to update their scripts, habits, shell configs; or - The GNU Grep maintainers spend essentially zero minutes "maintaining" a few lines of code to automatically use -E or -F based on argv[0]. It seems to me the second is obviously the better option.

So. Thought experiment. Which has lower cognitive load if everyone starts doing it? Explicitly specifying switches, or argv magic? I'd argue, the switches are. In the abscence of the symlinking, that is how the tool functionality would have to be driven anyway. Argv magic now runs into a problem if another program sharing the name ever comes into existence on the path. It's also completely unergonomic in a sense, bec…

  $ cat =egrep =fgrep
  #!/bin/sh
  exec grep -E "$@"
  #!/bin/sh
  exec grep -F "$@"

Post by TillE » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

cestith wrote: post #108

ufo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it would still be nice to have at least one such example. Looking at the rest of the discussion thread here on HN as of now it's still only hypotheticals.

Here's one example. This is in code my team inherited a long time ago, and there are many more like it. databases=`find /var/lib/mysql -type d | sed 's/\/var\/lib\/mysql\///g' | egrep -v 'mysql|test|performance|schema'`

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

Ensorceled wrote: post #26

roenxi wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is free software. It is legitimate to consider convenience for the maintainers. If they don't want to maintain two symlinks then they are empowered to make that call. If anyone thinks it is a big enough problem that they want to fork the software they can, or the distros can maintain their own symlinks. But I think in this case the simple answer is if the maintainer doesn't want it in the source tarball then it…

I don't know when society in general just said "Fuck It" to the idea of stewardship; but we now have it ingrained that people in positions of trust and power (whether volunteered, elected or appointed) are not morally or ethically beholden or responsible to the communities they have taken it upon themselves to represent. At least we used to pay lip service to that ideal.

Post by simoncion » Thu, Oct 13, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #112

ajross wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, are you going to call up all my former employers to tell them to audit the scripts I wrote for them in the late 90's? I really don't think people understand the impact here. It's not it's just a bunch of angry geriatric graybeards yelling at the modern world. It's that there is decades of uncounted, unrecognized, untraceable software written using these old conventions that are suddenly changing. It's just a terr…

Either a system is frozen and static, in which case it will not receive this version of GNU grep, and there is no problem. On the other hand, if a system receives updates, the system needs both minor and major changes all the time , to keep up with its ever-changing environment. This is the jungle in which we live. Linux syscalls are important to keep, since it’s hard to change a compiled binary. But it’s easy to cha…

    script.sh: line 100: fgrep: command not found