On 2022-09-30 11:10, enh via Toybox wrote:
On Fri, Sep 30, 2022 at 1:35 AM Rob Landley <[email protected]> wrote:
On 9/28/22 10:41, enh wrote:
On Tue, Sep 27, 2022 at 11:32 PM Rob Landley <[email protected]> wrote:
luckily i doubt we'll ever have to answer those
questions, because i doubt anything esoteric is likely to be used.
Famous. Last. Words.
well, "you're doing this to yourself". GNU tar doesn't support any of
this, busybox tar even less. so it's only toybox tar where someone
_could_ get themselves into a mess with this in the first place. (and
tbh, i still haven't seen an actual motivation beyond "orthogonality".
which is a fine goal all other things being equal, but "massive added
complexity", "ability to construct tar commands that no-one can read
[because hardly anyone knows sed beyond s/// any more]",
"interoperability issues with gnu/busybox", and "possible unintended
consequences" all sound like reasons to believe all other things are
_not_ equal here :-) )
Implementing behavior is easy. Figuring out what the behavior should
BE is hard.
tbh, this is where i like the (usual) rob landley toybox philosophy of
"i'll implement it when we have a motivating example of someone trying
to get something done with it, not just because it's mentioned in the
docs". i think that's a great pragmatic philosophy (in a world
dominated by dogmatic philosophies, to which group "orthogonality" --
for all its merits at times -- tends to belong). it also has the nice
side-effect of letting reality guide where to spend your time, because
it means you're focusing on things that users demonstrably need rather
than stuff that someone might want someday.
Sometimes it is important to think about the longer term future. One
reason
it can be difficult to do that is because often the previous people did
not.
Is it not valuable to reconsider the way in which things are done,
when the observation is that the old way is inconsistent, insecure,
or inefficient? or simply because perhaps a better way can be found?
Dismissing value simply because it is not immediately tangible
is a very short term philosophy.
Different people have different priorities and goals.
I for one appreciate observing the deep dive, because it gives me
intellectual access to something that's out of my current depth,
and gives me a much better idea of how I might use these constructs
in efficient ways to design new systems.
Just to be clear I do not disagree that practicality drives the bus, but
I am
also all for taking some extra time along the way if it means saving
time/energy later, and especially if that particular segment can
then be
laid to rest for longer. (Not to mention the cognitive/functional
overhead
of development setup and teardown ~ files, tabs, trains of
thought...)
Also makes it easier to understand retroactively when the history is
contiguous(-adjacent), when learning or refreshing one's memory of
something.
with this tar sed stuff i feel like i'm watching a man drill holes in
his own head, all the time crying that it hurts :-)
(though you are, i think, collecting a hell of a lot of circumstantial
evidence that the original implementors didn't think this through. but
to me that says "so neither should you" --- just do the minimum,
assume the weird shit is as useless as it appears, move on with your
life until/unless someone comes along who actually does need more. a
motivating example often makes things clearer. the lack of one is
often a sign you were right to ignore the whole mess :-) )
One consequence of this as a general strategy is it can put you on the
defensive.
Not there's anything inherently wrong with that, but how well does it
scale?
Getting in "good" habits tends to fortify responses to "real" problems;
not that there's any end to that process, but still worth considering.
Socially defining "good" can be a very challenging thing to do well.
/me wonders how much of this gnu behavior is even deliberate versus
accidental, and thus likely to be the kind of test that suffers from
debian version skew if/when anyone actually tries to use the gnu
version.
Is there any evidence of them doing that sort of thing?
~~
Just a couple pennies from an "outside" perspective, take em or leave
em..
- mtsl8
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