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

[enh]

i'd been deliberately _not_ sending you
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNU-Coreutils-9.5-Released for fear of
winding you up :-)

On Sat, Apr 13, 2024 at 7:34 AM Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>
> 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