On 3/22/24 15:02, enh wrote:
>> > CANONICALIZE_SPACE_IF_RUNNING_HOST_VERSION=1? so we trust ourselves but 
>> > no-one
>> > else? :-)
>>
>> I _don't_ trust myself, and I'm not special. (That's policy.)
> 
> yeah, but that's why i suggested
> CANONICALIZE_SPACE_IF_RUNNING_HOST_VERSION --- that way we can say "we
> can't make hard assertions about the _host's_ whitespace, but we can
> still make hard assertions about _ours_". if we just canonicalize all
> the whitespace all the time, we can't (say) ensure that columns line
> up or whatever.

Or we could just "NOSPACE=1 TEST_HOST=1 make tests" if that's the test we want
to run...?

>> Erik did lash (lame-ass shell) to be tiny, Ash was the bigass lump of 
>> complexity
>> copied out of debian or some such and nailed to the side of the project by 
>> that
>> insane Russian developer who never did learn english and communitcated 
>> entirely
>> through a terrible translator program (so any conversation longer than 2
>> sentences turned into TL;DR in EITHER direction, he was also hugely 
>> territorial
>> about anybody else touching "his" code), and msh was the minix shell mostly 
>> used
>> on nommu systems.
> 
> did lash _stay_ tiny?

Yes, but it was also borderline unusable.

> i feel like the trouble with projects like that
> is usually that no-one can agree on what's necessary versus bloat, so
> you trend towards just being a bad implementation of whatever. iirc
> inferno had _two_ different "tiny" shells.

Erik implemented something tiny for his own personal use, and ignored everybody
else who tried to add stuff to it.

When Erik moved on, I studied it. When I moved on, Bernhard removed it:

  https://git.busybox.net/busybox/commit/?id=96702ca945a8

>> > because, to be fair to the confused, in english
>> > "pending" _can_ legitimately mean "almost there". whereas your whole point 
>> > with
>> > pending is "i actually have _no_ idea how close this is yet".
>>
>> Linux has drivers/staging but I didn't like that.
> 
> yeah, "staging" also sounds very much like "nearly there!".

The problem is motivated reasoning. We could call the directory
instant_death_do_not_touch and people would still enable stuff in it to see if
it worked for them. (And then ship it when it Worked For Them.)

Rob
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