https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/

Whatever the first implementation does ends up being a suicide pact by default.

I agree. The behavior of rm and cat and cp and mv and dd and many other utilities don’t necessarily have the interface I would prefer, but they are too widely used for it to be helpful to radically change them. It’s somewhat unfortunate that these names are already reserved, but I don’t think it’s necessary to change them.

In the same way, I don’t have a problem with packages having generic names but not actually being useful: I’ve read that the requests and urllib3 packages for Python aren’t being maintained very well, but I don’t mind that as long as I can accomplish things while following best practices.

Because of this, I’m not afraid to use names like “getRequest” or “result”, especially if they were generated with an automatic refactoring, and I’m not upset when I see similarly generic names being used with source code I’m changing, since I know that the second name for something that’s similar to an existing thing will have to actually be descriptive, but the first name is likely to not be.

I have another example of how I’d apply these thoughts: the process for developing v2+ modules for the Go programming language strikes me as inelegant, so I would probably prefer to just create an entirely new repository rather than try to attempt that.

What operating system should I use with my laptop that isn’t an awkward kludgy idiosyncratic mess? I would say that Windows has plenty of kludges, like having problems with certain file names. Many versions of macOS are UNIX® Certified Products (for example, macOS version 15.0 Sequoia on Intel-based Mac computers and on Apple silicon-based Mac computers), so it’s surely not any less kludgy than Linux.

I suppose that it’s not bad to change documentation to be more specific, and change a program such that it matches the new documentation and wouldn’t cause any harm if it replaced all the existing versions of the program, but makes it possible to use the program to solve more problems. That would be to “add functionality in a backward compatible manner”.

You are also free to create new programs that are not an exact replacement for existing programs, but can enable some people to stop using one or more other programs. That would not be what I describe as stagnation.

“The cat utility shall read files in sequence and shall write their contents to the standard output in the same sequence.”, so I would be very annoyed if it did something different with a certain file but not others. I wouldn’t say that the contents of a file and the contents after the file is expanded are the same. In fact, I expect that some people use cat to process compressed files, and changing how cat acts with compressed files would probably cause them a large amount of annoyance, and would needlessly make a lot of existing documentation incorrect.

I think that providing an exit status that is not 0 when zcat is used with an uncompressed file is useful. Though my opinion is less strong regarding whether it should write more text after an error occurred, it’s probably more useful for a process to terminate quickly when an error occurred rather than risk a second error occurring and making troubleshooting harder.

I think that trying to change any existing documented features of widely used utilities will lead to us having less useful software in the future (our time is probably better spent making new programs and new documentation): https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

You are correct. This probably produces something more similar to what you’d want the original command to do, but with better safely:

find -- . -type f -regex '^\./[^/]*$' -exec sh -c -- 'for file in "${@}"; do zcat "${file}" || cat "${file}" || exit; done' sh '{}' '+'

That assumes you want to interact with files with names like .hidden.txt.gz though. If you don’t, and only intend to have a directory with regular files (as opposed to directories or symbolic links or other types of file), using this is much simpler and even safer, and avoids using files in a surprising order:

for i in *; do zcat -- "$i" || cat -- "$i" || exit; done

Of course, the real solution is to avoid using the Shell Command Language at all, and to carefully adapt any program to your particular problem as needed: https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/safe-shell/

Remember that the system documentation can be different for different operating systems. For example, it’s notorious that the documentation for sed differs between GNU and macOS, particularly regarding the -i option: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4247068/sed-command-with-i-option-failing-on-mac-but-works-on-linux

In order to avoid surprises related to this, “POSIX.1-2024 defines a standard operating system interface and environment, including a command interpreter (or “shell”), and common utility programs to support applications portability at the source code level.” https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/ https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/sed.html

Building a Cathedral without Science or Mathematics: The Engineering Method Explained

Technical problems and political problems can be related, and discussing one in the context of the other can be useful.

https://jakeukalane.github.io/archiving.html

It will definitely be the only utility I recall that uses a numeral.

Utility names should include lowercase letters (the lower character classification) and digits only from the portable character set.

• https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/utilities.html
  • https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/m4.html
    • m is for macro processor. 3 is the version number. In the days of its creation, programs were given as short a name as possible to preserve memory and disk space as both were expensive and in short supply.
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_(computer_language)
  • https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/fort77.html
  • https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/c99.html
    • It was difficult to achieve a satisfactory solution to the problem of name space in option characters. When the standard developers desired to extend the historical cc utility to accept ISO C standard programs, they found that all of the portable alphabet was already in use by various vendors. Thus, they had to devise a new name, c89 (now superseded by c99), rather than something like cc -X.

Note that many versions of macOS adhere to these standards: https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/ https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3700.htm https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3705.htm

I know it had been this way for decades and was grandfathered in as a feature

If people were more resistant to “grandfathered” features I think we would not have as much software as we do today: https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

provide about 50%–80% of what you want from an operating system

one expects that if the 50% functionality Unix and C support is satisfactory, they will start to appear everywhere.

Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses.

users have already been conditioned to accept worse than the right thing.

It’s probably possible to make several programs with “50% functionality” in the time it takes to make one program with 100% functionality. Having more programs that are suitable for a majority of relevant applications is probably better than having one program that is suitable for all relevant applications, since having more programs will probably enable a larger variety of problems to be solved, and people often have to solve many different types of problems in their life.

what does usr mean

https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/fhs.shtml https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch04.html

Some operating systems may handle long path or file names in a surprising way, so having short paths and names is useful: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/V1_chap04.html#tag_04_13

If any pathname component is longer than {NAME_MAX}, the implementation shall consider this an error.

if the combined length exceeds {PATH_MAX}, and the implementation considers this to be an error, pathname resolution shall fail

{NAME_MAX} and {PATH_MAX} are described in more detail at https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/basedefs/limits.h.html#tag_13_23_03_02 and used in the context of https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/pathchk.html

Note

The resources I linked are descriptive and not prescriptive, but in my experience they are suitable to depend upon as a reliable baseline, which makes meeting client requirements with software engineering easier.

You surely need to explicitly cause systemd to process changes after writing to a file. I would be very surprised if it reacted to file system changes automatically.

For example, I recall that I need to execute a command like systemctl daemon-reload after editing a service file: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/364782/what-does-systemctl-daemon-reload-do

You might get more useful information from resources like https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/systemctl.1.html

The end of the article does try to take a hopeful tone:

“I definitely prefer talking with people in real life, though,” he added.

I don’t necessarily agree with everything though:

While some of the culture around Character.AI is concerning, it also mimics the internet activity of previous generations who, for the most part, have turned out just fine.

I believe Skiff would automatically start using end to end encryption when it was available, without any user needing to enable it for any specific email, using the Web Key Directory standard: https://github.com/privacyguides/privacyguides.org/blob/1634bea9d2a66ef5804b68d18d4218e0b7a8b806/docs/email.md#openpgp-compatible-services

It’s not good for me that an email provider that supports that is undergoing dramatic changes, as an open standard that protects my privacy is more useful when it is used with more services.