Re: fdm, paredit and systemd

On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

Excellent! I wonder if it can replace mbsync nicely as well? Would be nice to
have fdm handle both my mbsync (so sync imap folders to local laptop) _and_ to
take care of news posts! I can easily see how the filters would take care of
sorting the posts from various newsgroups into their respective folders in my
mail client.

>
I'm not a user of mbsync, but if you use mbsync just to download mail
from an IMAP server, then certainly fdm can replace it.

Excellent! As an added bonus, I would then get off mbsync. I think the creator
of mbsync was woke, and changed master/slave to something I no longer remember
in the code, in order not to offend people. Complete nonsense!

As for posting, my mail client, alpine, has that covered! =)

>
You should be good then. :)

Excellent!

daemons.  But it turns out that's the only thing about systemd that I
ever liked.  And even then I changed my opinion.  Daemons are not really
meant to be managed by regular users; if there's any user that should
have the right to run a daemon, then they should have sysadmin powers,
even if specifically just for the task at hand.  Bottom line: it's a
neat thing that it does, but it might not quite be a real need.

>
I agree! That's the problem, it tries to be too neat, and to do too much. In the
end you have this horrible monolithic kludge that will probably crash due to its
complexity, and take the system with it.
>
Another thing I intensely dislike with it is the long and convoluted syntax of
the commands. I mean just look at "ls"... it's beautiful! And "l" followed by an
"s"! =D
>
Now look at this horrible mess: "systemctl list-timers" Yuck!

>
Yeah---there's a fine line between incrementing language and sticking
with the previous, well-established vocabulary.  That's particularly
important for hackers because they have an imense amount of vocabulary
to manage and great fluency is essential to their day-to-day operations.

Another example from hell for me is powershell. I've never seen such long
command! Microsoft powershell gurus must really enjoy typing!

That's good! After all, if I don't want systemd, there are distributions without
it. =) The only annoying thing is that since I teach linux I am forced to teach
the most common tools, and sadly that means systemd.

>
No intention to question you here, but I'm sure you know how
questionable this might be.  I would think it's not really important to
teach about systemd, specially if you don't find it beautiful.  The

Sadly I have to. Every course is governed by a governance document that
specifies what must be taught. If a concept in that document is not taught,
students can complain to the government, and the school gets a mark in their
naughtiness register, and if too many accumulate, they can get fines.
The work around is, of course, (and I do this to some extent) that it is not
specified how deep one has to go into it. So a classic example was an intro to
linux course, where the governance document said that the students must be
taught how to compile their own software with configure/make/make install.
So I cover that in about 20 minutes, since it is completely out of place in a
short introduction to linux course.

principles and their concrete illustrations are much more interesting.
The ``everything is a file'' is an example, and you can illustrate with
countless examples.  Modularity is another relevant word and can be seen
at its prime in UNIX systems (and extremely in software such as qmail),
with opposite examples in sendmail and also in systemd.

Very much true.

On the other hand, I'm thinking here that you'd remark that your courses
are highly practical, involved with system administration per se.  I'm
aware of that.  But, still, I really don't see system administration
very different from software writing.  I would not find it too important

Yes... that's the vocational school style. Short courses 4 - 12 weeks depending
on the subject, to get people barely up and running, and the idea is that they
will then learn the finer details on the job or during their job training.
When it comes to system administration in the modern sense, yes, there is an
overlap with being a kind of programmer. But before that stage in their
training, they learn how to do everything by hand, and only in a later course
(the cloud course) do the students get to try their hand at scripting deployment
of containers, VM:s, and finally... the live cloud with publicly accessible
machines.

to discuss the operational details of a specific system or software.
Certainly a UNIX system has its own particularties in their rc scripts,
but I would spend more time looking at POSIX-sh semantics, style,
philosophy and history because it's primarily sh scripts that engineer
the start-up schemes of UNIX systems.  Because then every hacker can use
that kind of culture to investigate whatever system he's interested in.

Oh believe me... I've had to _fight_ to keep any resemblance of teaching basic
bash scripting in the linux course. At first students hate it, but the brilliant
ones later on tell me that they actually picked up a lot of linux while bash
scripting, instead of if we used python or something else. This makes me happy
and works as intended! ;)

In other words, I'd go for depth, not immediate working knowledge.
Every system administrator will have to grind through the manuals
anyway.  Knowing how to start or stop daemons, say, in a particular
system would not be terribly useful in a classroom.  Of course, we would
see how run the commands in whatever system we're using for the
illustrations at the black board or at the computer lab, but merely to
see things in motion.

I wish we could do that... but the amount of teaching hours and focus on the
vocation schools make that very difficult. =(