Re: fdm, paredit and systemd (Was: Re: Schneier, Data and Goliath: no hope for privacy)

On Tue, 25 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

Oh, that might even make my python script redundant! This gets more interesting
by the minute!

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It will surely do.  (It is also a powerful filter, so you can organize
your NNTP articles into various different Maildir, essentially being
your NNTP client from the downloading perspective.  For uploading, we
will need another program.)

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

Never heard of. It was a bit too quick, so I'm still not quite sure what it
does. Some of that jumping around can be achieved in vim, but since I'm not
familiar with lisp nor with exactly what he was doing, it is difficult
to say.

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I'd bet vim can do the same.
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It's not important.  But the illustration there is that Lisp programmers
don't worry about parentheses; it's all managed by them by editors such
as the GNU EMACS (with its various packages for handling these
specialized operations).

Yes, that makes a lot more sense. Manually typing all of those parentheses would
be horrible! ;) It reminds me of an old xkcd comic... there were your father
parenthesis, a more civilized weapon for a more civilized age. ;)

It's a pleasure to use paredit-mode.  Let me quote Donald Norman.  I'm
gonna show a larger quote, but my point here is on pleasure of use and a
``feeling of control''.

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This is true. I like the idea that everything is a file, and that log files are
plain text. It increases my feeling of control over the system.

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Good illustration!
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That is why I do not like systemd. It moves away from this philosophy
and frankly, I still have not experienced anything that I need systemd
for, that could not have been solved without it.

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One thing I liked about systemd is that regular users can have their own
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!

Let's take daemontools by djb, say.  You can let regular users run their
own daemons with a simple UNIX command of letting the directory where
daemon lives have the adequate permissions for regular users to manage
their own daemons.
>
Now let's take the dependency management of systemd.  Is that neat and
cool?  It is.  But a competent sysadmin knows exactly what's needed in
his start-up scripts---he doesn't need something complex to handle it.
If he doesn't, he would want to learn.  Once he learns, I can't quite
see much of a point in having those things be completely managed by a
monolithic subsystem that's trying to hide details from the sysadmin.
>

Sad!

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It's alright.  As long as there are systems that don't buy the Microsoft
way of things, we're good.  And there will always be because hackers
never buy into the nonsense.

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.