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Exa Is Deprecated

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Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#61

Post by sanderjd »

scbrg wrote: post #46
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.

And yet, exa is deprecated :-)

Yes but people did not find it daunting to create a fork.

But if what the comment I replied to meant by "capable of maintaining them myself" was about having an organizational structure where they could become an official maintainer of the official project rather than needing to fork it if the owner becomes unavailable, then yep, that's a great point about these single-owner projects.

But my original interpretation was about the difficulty of maintaining the code. To me, these rust tools are a huge improvement in that way.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#62

Post by smartmic »

bachmeier wrote: post #37
arjvik wrote: post #4

I've been using LSD instead of Exa, so I'm lightly relieved that I don't have to change over. Both projects are amazing little utilities that when combined with a well-customized shell, really make using the terminal a joy. I absolutely love the trend of rewriting classic Unix utilities in rust, because the new tools often have (small or large) usability and quality of life improvements that altogether make the termi…

> I absolutely love the trend of rewriting classic Unix utilities I avoid them unless I'm capable of maintaining them myself. My primary reason for using classic Unix utilities is trusting that they'll still work in a few years. The initial stages of a rewrite can be a lot of fun, but I want to use it long after the excitement has worn off.

s/they'll still work in a few years/they'll still work in a few decades/

Related: the Lindy effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#63

Post by sebastianz »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #50
blueflow wrote: post #10

exa: 8 years, dead ls: 38 years and counting. Long live ls.

pneumatic drill: 8 years, dead the sharp stick of metal my dad gave me: 38 years and counting long live the sharp stick of metal ? What a terrible take. Yes, ls is maintained. Although, maintained is a very strong word. It exists. It's getting a few maintenance commits here and there, and in the mean time, it's feature done. It won't evolve anymore. Just like how exa will keep existing, and won't evolve anymore. Exa…

> Yes, ls is maintained. Although, maintained is a very strong word. It exists.

Why would it be a strong word? Here it is, in src/ls.c: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils

It is then packaged by tens of operating system distributions, who themselves maintain extra patchsets, some of which are then upstreamed.

It is installed and used on millions (billions?) of devices, for 3 decades.

It's a very reliable and trusty "sharp stick of metal" :)

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#64

Post by basedrum »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #50
blueflow wrote: post #10

exa: 8 years, dead ls: 38 years and counting. Long live ls.

pneumatic drill: 8 years, dead the sharp stick of metal my dad gave me: 38 years and counting long live the sharp stick of metal ? What a terrible take. Yes, ls is maintained. Although, maintained is a very strong word. It exists. It's getting a few maintenance commits here and there, and in the mean time, it's feature done. It won't evolve anymore. Just like how exa will keep existing, and won't evolve anymore. Exa…

I like how people are arguing that ls is alive, like there is active work being done on it over 38 years. A Unix tool that does one thing well can be considered finished and sit for years without anything going on. That doesn't mean it's dead. Sure, maybe people want fancy new stuff, but again, doesn't mean dead. If it had security problems for years, then one could argue that it's dangerous for it not to be updated and if it isn't, then proclaim it dead so people will move to something safer, but this trend to call something dead because it isn't in rust and doesn't have colors and git awareness? Meh

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#65

Post by sillysaurusx »

goku12 wrote: post #2

I hope that the author Benjamin Sago is alright. It's always concerning when FOSS developers disappear for a while - even though it isn't uncommon.

Their personal site is gorgeous: https://bsago.me

The tech notes are particularly useful: https://bsago.me/tech-notes

There’s a ray of hope on their RSS feed: https://bsago.me/tech-notes/feed.json

The last published date is September 2022, which is almost a year after their last GitHub activity: https://github.com/ogham?tab=overview&from=2021-12-01&to=202...

So in absence of other information, I’d rather believe they’re ok. I’ve gone through periods of my life where I blow off all existing responsibilities and reinvent myself. A big project like exa comes with a lot of responsibilities that don’t become apparent until it explodes in popularity; it’s understandable for people to want to disassociate from those.

Some might argue that open source authors have a responsibility to communicate status, but it seems like Benjamin fulfilled that by making sure exa had additional maintainers that could update the readme with a deprecation notice.

One other strange phenomenon is that when you run from a responsibility, it can feel like more and more of a hurdle to come back and face it, at least for me. So it’s probably best to assume they’re fine and to put as little pressure on them as possible. Even just popping in to say “I’m still alive” can feel like pressure.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#66

Post by basedrum »

perihelions wrote: post #12
broodbucket wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the opposite feeling about package lethargy, I don't want to remember that exa is now eza at the time that my distro finally gets around to packaging eza, I want to do it now when it's right in front of me. I'll go try lsd instead (and then I'll try the other ls rewrite, har har)

Ehh, I guess I'm your opposite. I want to be insulated from exciting upstream developments, especially for stable, boring stuff like coreutils. I want those to be boring. I don't want "exa is now eza" or whatever push-notified to my command line on a random Tuesday.

Yet you read hacker news, where you get pushed the latest thing every day

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#67

Post by kibwen »

scbrg wrote: post #46
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.

And yet, exa is deprecated :-)

This is a non-sequitur. The repo is deprecated because the repo owner is absent, and development is continuing in a fork.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#68

Post by blueflow »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #50
blueflow wrote: post #10

exa: 8 years, dead ls: 38 years and counting. Long live ls.

pneumatic drill: 8 years, dead the sharp stick of metal my dad gave me: 38 years and counting long live the sharp stick of metal ? What a terrible take. Yes, ls is maintained. Although, maintained is a very strong word. It exists. It's getting a few maintenance commits here and there, and in the mean time, it's feature done. It won't evolve anymore. Just like how exa will keep existing, and won't evolve anymore. Exa…

Good for you if you accept that your tools might get rug-pulled from you any time. I don't.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#69

Post by ohgodplsno »

basedrum wrote: post #64
ohgodplsno wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pneumatic drill: 8 years, dead the sharp stick of metal my dad gave me: 38 years and counting long live the sharp stick of metal ? What a terrible take. Yes, ls is maintained. Although, maintained is a very strong word. It exists. It's getting a few maintenance commits here and there, and in the mean time, it's feature done. It won't evolve anymore. Just like how exa will keep existing, and won't evolve anymore. Exa…

I like how people are arguing that ls is alive, like there is active work being done on it over 38 years. A Unix tool that does one thing well can be considered finished and sit for years without anything going on. That doesn't mean it's dead. Sure, maybe people want fancy new stuff, but again, doesn't mean dead. If it had security problems for years, then one could argue that it's dangerous for it not to be updated…

Exactly! ls is alive, and just exists, mostly. The commits done on it are extremely minor changes to save up 0.0001% of performance and because the APIs it was using are sometimes deprecated. And that's fine!

However, when a new project arrives and does more, suddenly it's dogshit because it's stopped evolving despite doing infinitely more than ls.

Unixheads have a weird inferiority complex when it comes to anything not in coreutils.

Re: Exa Is Deprecated

#70

Post by sbergot »

sod wrote: post #60
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.

The owner of a repository dying (assumption) is an example why you don't trust modern software? The active maintainers moved the project to a shared repository with a different name 2 years after the creator was seen anywhere.

You could argue that "modern" versions of old tools with a bus factor of 1 are harder to trust.
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