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Exa Is Deprecated

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Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#141

Post by cmrdporcupine »

baz00 wrote: post #123
unscaled wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so will exa, probably. And if it won't, it will be forked. Which is exactly the reason "ls" is working perfectly fine for you today. The original AT&T UNIX "ls" has been forked over and over again and rewritten from scratch several times. You're using an evolved fork of this "ls" if you're using macOS or BSD, but if you're on Linux you're using a rewrite (GNU coreutils ls), and if you're running BusyBox you're us…

That's mostly rubbish though. The reason ls works perfectly fine today is no one dares fuck with the interface in case they break everything that depends on 30 years of assumptions even if they do suck a little bit. That includes all the forks and rewrites. This is almost entirely missing in "modern" software development. And I don't think any of us have time or energy really to track down varying different forks of…

Tell me that you don't/haven't worked across a variety of Unix*en without telling me that you haven't...

Back in the day it was navigating all the crap between SunOS vs SysV, HPUX, AIX, BSD, etc and then later Solaris, Linux, etc Now it's OS X vs Linux coreutils vs busybox etc. They all have subtle different interfaces and while there is a common basis the reality is that 'ls' is a strange hill to die on for the point you're trying to make. Like 'ps', it's something people have messed with the flags and output a bunch of times...

As others have pointed out, there is no single `ls`, and it's been "replaced" in various systems many times. Yes, we have a contiguous usage of the GNU version for some time, but only really in Linux.

Homogeneity has never been the name of the game in Unix culture, I don't understand why people would insist on it now.

I say: Bring on the "modern alternatives". I just installed lsd. I used to keep a shell alias from lsd -> ls for years anyways :-)

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#143

Post by zanellato19 »

saurik wrote: post #105
sanderjd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YMMV, but many of us find it easier to maintain rust + cargo than the old C + autotools mess.

FWIW, my mileage definitely varied: autotools--which is quite easy if you bother to learn how it works and is then almost infinitely flexible--has pretty much never failed me (I think there was one incident for a while related to building stuff for iOS? regardless this was fixed long ago), but I have had to file and participate in a number of bugs on cargo, most of which are still open :/, and I haven't even develope…

Which system do you use that cargo failed to compile? On Linux and Mac I have never had anything fail to compile for me with it.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#145

Post by jjgreen »

Klonoar wrote: post #127
mingus88 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either way, it still speaks to the maintainability of these modern replacements, many of which are personal projects. tools like ls or grep are certainly showing their age, but that has also been their strength. The POSIX ecosystem comes in many flavors but I can always depend on it. It’s not like I can ever expect to shell into any arbitrary system or container and expect to have exa/lsd/rg or any of these nice repl…

> My tooling needs to be somewhat more portable. Ah yes, because it's 100% impossible to learn new tools and fall back to the core ones when you need to. ;P I've been doing this for decades now, it's just not that big of a deal.

... as in

   if [ -z "$(which exa)" ]
   then
     LS1='ls -1'
   else
     :
   fi
   ${LS1} ${SOME_DIR} | ... 

?

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#146

Post by baz00 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #141
baz00 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mostly rubbish though. The reason ls works perfectly fine today is no one dares fuck with the interface in case they break everything that depends on 30 years of assumptions even if they do suck a little bit. That includes all the forks and rewrites. This is almost entirely missing in "modern" software development. And I don't think any of us have time or energy really to track down varying different forks of…

Tell me that you don't/haven't worked across a variety of Unix*en without telling me that you haven't... Back in the day it was navigating all the crap between SunOS vs SysV, HPUX, AIX, BSD, etc and then later Solaris, Linux, etc Now it's OS X vs Linux coreutils vs busybox etc. They all have subtle different interfaces and while there is a common basis the reality is that 'ls' is a strange hill to die on for the poin…

I think you're reading me wrong.

I spent a good deal of time working on SunOS (right back to m68k stuff), Solaris, HP/UX, Linux and FreeBSD over the years and use macOS now and am more than aware of the inconsistencies.

My point is that we pretty much standardised on some basic semantics around each command and what is portable and what is not. And now we're considering moving away from those learnings back to the wild west again.

I consider GNU to be a particularly bad variety of the wild west here for reference. I'm old enough to have been fucked by the differences between gawk and awk.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#147

Post by unscaled »

gnubison wrote: post #107
unscaled wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And so will exa, probably. And if it won't, it will be forked. Which is exactly the reason "ls" is working perfectly fine for you today. The original AT&T UNIX "ls" has been forked over and over again and rewritten from scratch several times. You're using an evolved fork of this "ls" if you're using macOS or BSD, but if you're on Linux you're using a rewrite (GNU coreutils ls), and if you're running BusyBox you're us…

Vi is in POSIX, it has been open source since 2002, and some version of it truly is on every UNIX system.

And non of them is the original vi by Bill Joy, which has been "deprecated" for years now.

My point is that all the FUD about "exa" being deprecated is just that - FUD. It's still open source and it can be forked and carried on, just like vi did. The "exa/eza" forks might even be more compatible with each other than the various vi forks/rewrites out there, although admittedly exa is a much simpler tool.

I think we're witnessing a weird fetishization of POSIX and/or GNU coreutils, like they are the epitome of stability, compatibility and continuity, but if you look at them historically, they are not so different from all these Rust rewrites.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#148

Post by jjgreen »

meepmorp wrote: post #102
imiric wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't type `ls` directly either. Aliases like `l`, `ll` and `la` are very common, in which case it really doesn't matter which tool you're using. I've been using `exa` for years, and my aliases work regardless if it's installed or not. I just get a better UX if it is.

> Most people don't type `ls` directly either. Aliases like `l`, `ll` and `la` are very common, in which case it really doesn't matter which tool you're using. Huh. I always use plain ls with flags and deliberately unset aliases like ll. I guess I'm weird.

You're not alone, is saving one character worth losing the muscle-memory?

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#150

Post by 59nadir »

qalmakka wrote: post #125
dahfizz wrote: post #49

Yet another example of why I don't trust any software that markets itself as "modern". In another 20 years, ls will still work perfectly fine.

I use `exa` (and now `eza`) because it provides a better experience than GNU `ls`, IMHO. Sure, I don't _need_ it, but it's nice. I don't see any downside, especially since I've aliased it to `ls` since time immemorial and thus I only need to re-alias eza to ls again.

> I use `exa` (and now `eza`) because it provides a better than GNU `ls`, IMHO.

A better what?

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