[Toybox] today in "shut up, gnu!"

[Rob Landley]

On 4/12/24 13:24, enh via Toybox wrote:
> ~/aosp-main-with-phones$ find external/ -name NOTICE -type l -maxdepth 2
> find: warning: you have specified the global option -maxdepth after
> the argument -name, but global options are not positional, i.e.,
> -maxdepth affects tests specified before it as well as those specified
> after it.  Please specify global options before other arguments.
> 
> (it does do the right thing, but insists on whining first.)

I've hit that too, and am big into Not Doing That. Thought I'd blogged about it,
but it could have been irc, or twitter (which I deleted when twitler bought it
but have an archive I should probably post somewhere), or... probably too old
for mastodon?

There's a reason I get so exasperated about each new gnu/nag I stub my toe on.
It's gone beyond isolated incident into "pattern of looking down on everyone
else and sneering".

Unix has always been a silent protagonist, without which shell scripts are a
pain to do. If it doesn't work, they'll figure out why. Just behave consistently
(according to SOME kind of understandable logic) and let them keep the pieces.
Sometimes there's a -v flag to activate printfs() stuck into the code, but don't
express opinions when they didn't ASK. (Put them in the man page or --help if
it's that important.)

This has ALWAYS been the unix way. There are ALWAYS corner cases, and
deterministic behavior is not difficult to debug. The gnu/FSF never got that.
Stallman only decamped to unix under protest, a refugee from the Jupiter
project's collapse orphaning ITS, and he never really understood it.

RMS did not INVENT the idea of cloning unix with his big announcement in 1983.
Unix was a diverse community starting from the 1974 ACM article, let alone the
Berkeley Software Distribution in 1975. The first full from-scratch Unix clone
(writing their own kernel, compiler, and command line) was Coherent, which
shipped in 1980. Paul Allen copied subdirectories and file descriptors from unix
into DOS 2.0 not long after. Minix started in 1983 and shipped in 1986, and
Linux is 100% a descendant of Minix (developed on minix, its first filesystem
was minix, the development discussion on comp.os.minix, he inherited 80% of the
minix community because he took patches and Tanenbaum didn't...) There's a
famous tanenbaum-torvalds debate preserved for posterity, there is NOT a
stallman-torvalds debate because nobody cared what stallman had to say.

Nor did he invent freeware, which was the universal norm before the Apple vs
Franklin decision in 1983 because you couldn't copyright binaries before Steve
Jobs got the appeals court to change the law. Byte and Compute magazines had
basic listings in the back of each issue for you to type in, decus and CP/M
northwest had software libraries, the commodore 64 came bundled with a disk of
Jim Butterfield's software but he didn't WORK for them: he founded the Toronto
Pet User's Group (TPUG) and published free software with source code.

But Stallman mansplained at everyone else at the top of his lungs nonstop from
the moment he showed up, and there are all sorts of topics that can't NOT have
an "as opposed to what stallman's saying, the truth is" section today...

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeware

Sigh, watching https://youtu.be/2gOGHdZDmEk and https://youtu.be/WWfsz5R6irs and
https://youtu.be/9RO5ZAmzjvI every time the narration talks about Pierre Spray I
get Stallman vibes. There's a broadcast version of Dunning-Kruger where you
plausibly preach to an audience who doesn't know better, and become The Expert
that everybody must get a quote from every time something happens in that area,
while the people actually doing the work facepalm at every third word.

Rob