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The Rule of Silence (2006)

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Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#81

Post by Ianvdl »

borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

> To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text.

The amount of tooling that surrounds text is vast and has evolved over decades. You cannot replace that with a single database and call it better.

I can place the majority of my config files in git and version them. I can easily perform a full text search on any log regardless of its syntax. I can effortlessly relocate and distribute logs to different filesystems.

> I want my software configuration stored in a database not in a bunch of fragile files with made up syntax that are always one typo or syntax error away from being potentially silently ignored.

So you would like your configuration stored as a bunch of made up data structures? Databases do not make you immune from typos and syntax errors, ask anyone who has ever written a delete without a where clause.

And what happens when the giant, all-knowing database your system depends on has a bug or vulnerability? When something on my linux box breaks I can drop to a recovery mode or lower runlevel and fix it with a kernel and a shell as dependencies.

I think you would be a lot happier with a configuration management system (puppet, ansible et al) and some log infrastructure without having to completely redo the unix philosophy and the years of experience and fine-tuning that comes with it.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#82

Post by teddyh »

verinus wrote: post #79
anoother wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find this stupid. The job of `kill` is to send a signal, not to wait around afterwards. Unix makes it trivial to write a wrapper script around `kill` that does exactly what you want -- that's the entire point.

then it should be named `sendKill` imho...

Given the naming conventions of early Unix, you should be happy they didn’t name it “kl”.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#83

Post by riskneural »

verinus wrote: post #78
borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

I'm with you when it comes to structured data, but plz no more data bases. these config files do not need to be centralized. I am thinking more in the direction of a parser that could check the validity of a configuration...

So, horribly unreadable xml config files?

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#84

Post by koralatov »

borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

I don't disagree with you, but how do we decide which structured data format to use as a replacement for plaintext? I have the sneaking feeling that a large part of why we still use plaintext is because it's established already as the standard, for worse or for better, and replacing it with a standard everyone could agree on proved impossible.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#85

Post by imagist »

borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

I can see your argument for consistent structure--I definitely don't love vimscript or nginx's custom configuration language. But that doesn't require we jump out of text--JSON and XML are viable, provided they remain geared toward hand editing.

It may be that given proper tooling for database-driven configuration it could be visible and accessible, but the fact is, I haven't seen timing that pulled that off.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#86

Post by fnj »

bluetomcat wrote: post #11
zeveb wrote: post #6

Honestly, I don't know if the rule of silence is actually all that good of an idea. Unix already gives us stdout vs stderr; it's one thing not to write useless information to stdout, but it could be useful to have a stdinfo or stdlog or what-have-you. Granted, with too many options it could quickly get confusing (should this message go to stdout or stdinfo; is that message more informational or more debugging?), but…

> Similarly, I think that Unix fell down by relying too much on unstructured text This is what made Unix last. Text and keyboards are the universal computing interface that has survived since the 1970s.

> This is what made Unix last.

An unfortunate turn of phrase. It's ambiguous. Do you mean last as in "endure"? Or do you mean last as in "last place"?

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#87

Post by rtpg »

skrebbel wrote: post #80
borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

In 1993, someone made exactly your argument a in Redmond board room, and so many people agreed that what you describe could be adequately called "The Windows Philosophy". All settings in a database and not text files (the registry); a command-line that pipes data, not text (PowerShell). Tailored UIs to change settings, not magic invocations and obsure text file syntaxes. I guess most developers on HN are also aware o…

Surely you can reconcile structured representations and something like the Unix command line.

Imagine if the default wasn't bash, but something like Ruby + pipes (or some other terse language).

What is the argument for shell scripts not working on typed objects? How much time has been lost, how many bugs have been created because every single interaction between shell scripts has to include its own parser. How many versions of " get file created timestamp from ls" do we need?

Something Windows does get right is the clipboard. You place a thing on the clipboard, and when you paste, the receiving program can decide on the best representation. This is why copy-pasting images has worked so magically.

I could see an alternative system where such a mechanism exists for shell programs.

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#88

Post by dagenleg »

pherq wrote: post #52
setrofim_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would your example achieve? You're making the format more verbose and error-prone (someone might easily forget to match a paren), without imposting any additional structure over what is already implied by line breaks. Though I do agree with your overarching point that some of the formats/outputs could do with a more consistent structure. Perhaps something like YAML would strike a good balance between structure a…

> What would your example achieve? You're making the format more verbose and error-prone (someone might easily forget to match a paren), without imposting any additional structure over what is already implied by line breaks. That particular example is fairly straightforward (at a simple level, passwd files aren't complex), but being able to express arbitrary nested structure would make various things a lot more strai…

Maybe you shouldn't use arbitrary nested structures where you can go without?

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#89

Post by Chris2048 »

skrebbel wrote: post #80
borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

In 1993, someone made exactly your argument a in Redmond board room, and so many people agreed that what you describe could be adequately called "The Windows Philosophy". All settings in a database and not text files (the registry); a command-line that pipes data, not text (PowerShell). Tailored UIs to change settings, not magic invocations and obsure text file syntaxes. I guess most developers on HN are also aware o…

The windows registry is not too bad. You can easily store this stuff in a SQLite file though: https://www.sqlite.org/appfileformat.html

PowerShell' object-oriented nature is great btw!

Re: The Rule of Silence (2006)

#90

Post by redcalx »

skrebbel wrote: post #80
borplk wrote: post #74

To play devil's advocate, part of the reason things like The Rule of Silence are talked about is because of the messy unix philosophy of treating everything like plain text. If structured data was embraced we would have developed appropriate tooling to interact with it in the way that we prefer. This runs very deep in unix and a lot of people are too "brainwashed" to think of other ways. Instead they develop other ex…

In 1993, someone made exactly your argument a in Redmond board room, and so many people agreed that what you describe could be adequately called "The Windows Philosophy". All settings in a database and not text files (the registry); a command-line that pipes data, not text (PowerShell). Tailored UIs to change settings, not magic invocations and obsure text file syntaxes. I guess most developers on HN are also aware o…

I think IIS is a bad example, many of it's config settings are a complete mess of partially obsoleted legacy settings. And some of it has no definitive reference, e.g. the threading and concurrency settings which seem to change with each IIS version, but no documentation is available that defines what settings are available in each version.
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