[Novalug] Diversity

James Ewing Cottrell, III jecottrell3@comcast.net
Wed Jun 3 23:06:12 EDT 2015


Peter, you seem Content with Wandering Away from the UNIX Mantra:

"Programs should Do One Thing and Do It Well"

But you see, if they really *do* Do it Well, there is No Need for Another Program, is there???

I wasn't being Sarcastic, I was pointing out the Limitations of my own Argument: it's Stifling.

Still, Diversity takes my Learned Skills and Throws Them Away.

Yes, Sendmail has been gon for awhile, but the joke is Really on Postfix...everybody uses Exchange anyway.

Please don't ever mention CSH is Polite Company, you know better! ksh and zsh are fine alternatives.

dnsmasq isn't really a serious nameserver, it's a Toy. But it does have some interesting ideas.

Now, I don't write software anymore, just sysadmin scripts. But make is still useful for collecting a bunch of shell scripts together along with some ordering.
And most of the System Software is still in C, so guess what rpmbuild does: configure, make and make install.

How do you get to X from the Editor statement? And really who needs kate, gedit, axe, nano, pico? The one exception might be a truly small editor for an embedded system with limited space. 

There is another reason to prefer a Standard Program for each task: Security. The more people Using a Program, the more people who can Fix it.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Larsen" <peter@peterlarsen.org>
To: "James Ewing Cottrell, III" <jecottrell3@comcast.net>, "Xavier Belanger" <firemountain@belanger.fr>
Cc: "James Ewing Cottrell, III via Novalug" <novalug@firemountain.net>
Sent: Wednesday, June 3, 2015 10:37:22 PM
Subject: Re: [Novalug] What's the RFC, Kenneth?

On 06/03/2015 10:24 PM, James Ewing Cottrell, III via Novalug wrote:


> As for Diversity, I consider that a BAD thing:

How is the weather on your planet? Of course diversity is a good thing -
otherwise we'll never know what solution is best.

> Bind is THE Name Server

It's A name server. dnsmasq is another.

> Sendmail is THE Mailer

It's A MTA - postfix is another (and actually took over as the most used
a long time ago).

> Bash is THE Shell

I thought you wrote some weeks ago about missing some of the other
shells?  It's _a_ shell, ksh, csh are examples of others.

> Make is THE Program Builder

Now that's just plain fun. You clearly aren't in the software building
industry anymore. Not sure I remember when I last used make.

> Vi and Emacs are THE Editors

Sure - no need for X either. We'll just do it all like in the 80ies and
use text formatters to generate the output.

> OK, by that kind of thinking Nothing New will ever be written, so there has to be a Balance.

So you lost me. So either the stuff above was sarcastic - or this was.
Otherwise nothing here makes sense. Cannot figure out which is what though.

>
> OTOH, I don't need 37 Programs to do the same thing. I hate it when I have to throw All My Expertise Away and become a Novice in the Fad-of-the-Month program.

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

-- 
Regards
  Peter Larsen





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