On Sun, 20 Sep 2015 15:15:52 +0800 "Casper Ti. Vector" <[email protected]> wrote:
> (Accidentally sent to Colin as private mail, reposting verbatim here; > sorry for the disturbance...) > > Well, this naming issue is all about overloading... To circumvent the > overloading problem, we can also use some other name pairs like > `start'/`stop' or `begin'/`end' (Gentoo and LaTeX user here ;). But > that introduces another problem: more names to remember. Which in turns calls for much more descriptive names. If I understand correctly, the current ./up and ./down are used for one-shots only. If these things are run at boot time and "stopped" at shutdown time, they could be called onboot and onhalt. Otherwise onrun and onstop. Or something more descriptive. > So this is somewhat a dilemma. Different context and developers might > lead to different decisions; I personally would rather like to support > overloading the `run'/`finish' name pair, for the similar reason for > Unix's choice of the `x' permission bit to represent both "executable" > for files and "enter-able" for directories: they are loosely > correlated concepts in orthogonal "subspaces". You know they're orthogonal in the expected use case. I know they're orthogonal in the expected use case. But the guy just learning this stuff doesn't know that intuitively, and unless the docs are written **just right**, it will cause confusion. Needless confusion. Confusion pushing the prospective user to another init system. Maybe systemd. I wasn't around when the decisions were made how to use the 'x' permission, but I do remember that in the early 80's (so certainly when the 'x' permission was specified), RAM was so dear. I had to write a report object, in C, because I just couldn't afford an 80x66 array of char. I have a feeling that RAM scarcity played a part in the duality of the 'x' permission, and I remember when I was new to Linux that 'x' permission's duality confused me for a little while. Overloading filenames for orthogonal uses strikes me as clever, but unnecessary and a documentation nightmare. SteveT Steve Litt August 2015 featured book: Troubleshooting: Just the Facts http://www.troubleshooters.com/tjust
