Re: fdm, paredit and systemd

D <nospam@example.net> writes:

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!

Lol.

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!

Besides, it's yet another shell.  Even if it were really great...  Have
you seen Plan9's rc?  It's a very neat shell.  But it's not Bourne's sh.
It's hard to overcome the inertia of a large body moving at high speed.

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!
;)

No shell scripting?  Okay---let's investigate a bit how the system
works.  ``What's in a name?  A rose by any other name would smell as
sweet.''  That's from a teacher I had called Juliet---she was pretty
old, born in 1597.  Her father was a famous play writer, whose name was
William Shakespeare if I recall correctly.

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. =(

I know. 

I also think that we shouldn't interfere so much with nature's course.
It's not that we don't care---it's that we respect the group.  Let's let
the group follow its ``natural'' course.  It's different when we're the
captain; we then steer as we like.

  You can be the captain
  And I'll draw the chart
  Sailing into destiny
  Closer to the heart
  -- Neil Peart, Peter Talbot, 1977