On Tue, Dec 30, 2008 at 2:21 PM, Peter da Silva <[email protected]> wrote: > No further comment is needed. Bastards.
boy, I've been wanting to expound upon this for years (and have, to anybody who'd sit still and listen); in fact I was just beating somebody over the head with it on Twitter earlier today (but that's a hate for another time). rounding out the top 5 (including auto-aliasing of mv(1) with the aforementioned rm(1) hate): * default setting of remote window title (at the system level, no less) - if I wanted my terminal windows to say bash, CWD, hostname, tty and process, I'd bloody well set it myself. This is a non-annoyance when using borderless, headless transparent Eterms, but pathological on e.g. Terminal.app or other equivalents where you have to manually open up prefs, clear some text and save your changes (or just close the term and open a new one) every damn time. * default colorized ls output - again: if I wanted this I'd bloody well turn it on. Options should default to the simplest common denominator and the principle of least surprise. * (partially) replacing functional standards (e.g. man(1) with info(1)) for the sake of ideology (this branches off into GNU hate: RMS and the FSF have done great things for software and the UNIX-like ecosystem, but there are a great many things I wish they'd just leave well enough alone. The worst part is when a GNU alternative is created, and the zealots all jump on it because it's GNU and therefore MORE FREE, only the GNU alternative is a bad idea, half-baked and only partially implemented, replacing full-grown, tested, mature and entirely capable non-GNU standards. technical decisions made on the basis of political/philosophical ideologies make me go looking for stabbing implements). * documentation - even if there _is_ a man page, it more likely than not either says "see http://some.url/which_has_moved for details" and/or is 4 major releases out of date with the actual installed software, or contains blatant factual errors (I'm going to gracefully overlook typographical, syntax and just plain unparseable English problems; if your primary language isn't English, and you're writing a man page in English and cannot string together phrases in a coherent manner, GET SOMEBODY TO ASSIST). And of course, the most common case is that of a man page which exists, and says "please see the TexInfo page for complete documentation". There's ALREADY A MAN PAGE you TOOLS, just drop your text in there instead of creating a placeholder pointing to a separate, equally outdated document presented in a non-standard, more complicated, completely unnecessary additional format that serves no purpose but to sow confusion and make the already ignored task of maintaining updated documentation that much more difficult. * filesystem hierarchies that changes with the phases of the moon - this situation has improved somewhat in the past few years, but the related hate of package management systems that drop 3rd party packages into system-level directories (/usr/bin, /sbin, etc. should have nothing in them that can't be restored by a wipe and a clean OS installation - packages should be clearly segregated for ease of management. Again, principle of least surprise.) There are quite a few others, but I have griped in silence for the past year or two (and haven't had to admin many Linux boxes recently) and am growing forgetful. Almost universally, however, these deficiencies ALL stem from a desire to make the system more helpful and friendly to users. I don't WANT my UNIX systems to be friendly or helpful, I want them to be consistent, predictable and accessible to those with the clue and experience required to run them. Folks who need friendly, helpful systems to hold their hands and look pretty should go buy a mac and get the hell off the servers. (I have several macs; none of them sit in the server room.) I'm an OpenBSD man, which nicely avoids almost all of these hates (and brings up several entirely different, but less irritating, ones). It's too bad there's no "--behave-like-a-UNIX-system-do-what-I-say-and-stop-getting-in-my-way-with-your-helpfulness" option for RedHat (Debian, SuSE, $distro) installs - but then, GNU longopts are a hate for another message. -- Scott Francis | darkuncle(at)darkuncle(dot)net | 0x5537F527 Less and less is done until non-action is achieved when nothing is done, nothing is left undone. -- the Tao of Sysadmin
