What is an example of “plain-text code”, or of someone fainting at the sight of it?
The Java® Language Specification explains that “Programs are written in Unicode”, which can reasonably be described as “Plain Text”, but I would be surprised to see someone fainting at the sight of one.
Doesn’t git status tell you what to do?
use “git add <file>…” to mark resolution
use “git commit” to conclude merge
I always use git status to check what is appropriate before doing anything else, since the right thing to do can sometimes be different, like after using git rebase when a break command was used vs when a squash command resulted in a conflict.
I think this is relevant: https://news.cs.washington.edu/2013/08/14/chicken-chicken-chicken-chicken-chicken/
I had some thoughts about the concept of a “Contributor License Agreement”.
If you are the sole author of a program, you have a special position in that you can distribute the program with any license you choose. People that are not the sole author that copy the source code are not able to do that. If the original sole author of a program incorporates changes from someone that did not sign a Contributor License Agreement, they lose that special position, since distributing the program with a new license would require consent from all the authors, which is surely harder if there are more authors.
Because of this, it might be worth supporting some “community fork” more than an “original” repository, since that makes it clear that the program is likely to only be distributed using a specific license. However, if I’m interacting with an “original” repository, I will expect to have to interact with a Contributor License Agreement in order to have my changes used, since the original authors will want to preserve some flexibility regarding what licenses they can use with their software.
I can imagine that someone would find a program like this to be useful, and depends on the presently common behavior of zcat, so I expect this is an important part of a system used by a corporation I interact with (and probably many more than I’d expect):
if
zcat ./file.txt.gz >/dev/null
then
process_file ./file.txt.gz
else
printf '%s\n' "There was a decimal exit status of ${?}"
fi
A failure to understand whether something is useful is not a good reason to change it.
Whatever the first implementation does ends up being a suicide pact by default.
I agree. The behavior of rm and cat and cp and mv and dd and many other utilities don’t necessarily have the interface I would prefer, but they are too widely used for it to be helpful to radically change them. It’s somewhat unfortunate that these names are already reserved, but I don’t think it’s necessary to change them.
In the same way, I don’t have a problem with packages having generic names but not actually being useful: I’ve read that the requests and urllib3 packages for Python aren’t being maintained very well, but I don’t mind that as long as I can accomplish things while following best practices.
Because of this, I’m not afraid to use names like “getRequest” or “result”, especially if they were generated with an automatic refactoring, and I’m not upset when I see similarly generic names being used with source code I’m changing, since I know that the second name for something that’s similar to an existing thing will have to actually be descriptive, but the first name is likely to not be.
I have another example of how I’d apply these thoughts: the process for developing v2+ modules for the Go programming language strikes me as inelegant, so I would probably prefer to just create an entirely new repository rather than try to attempt that.
What operating system should I use with my laptop that isn’t an awkward kludgy idiosyncratic mess? I would say that Windows has plenty of kludges, like having problems with certain file names. Many versions of macOS are UNIX® Certified Products (for example, macOS version 15.0 Sequoia on Intel-based Mac computers and on Apple silicon-based Mac computers), so it’s surely not any less kludgy than Linux.
I suppose that it’s not bad to change documentation to be more specific, and change a program such that it matches the new documentation and wouldn’t cause any harm if it replaced all the existing versions of the program, but makes it possible to use the program to solve more problems. That would be to “add functionality in a backward compatible manner”.
You are also free to create new programs that are not an exact replacement for existing programs, but can enable some people to stop using one or more other programs. That would not be what I describe as stagnation.
“The cat utility shall read files in sequence and shall write their contents to the standard output in the same sequence.”, so I would be very annoyed if it did something different with a certain file but not others. I wouldn’t say that the contents of a file and the contents after the file is expanded are the same.
In fact, I expect that some people use cat to process compressed files, and changing how cat acts with compressed files would probably cause them a large amount of annoyance, and would needlessly make a lot of existing documentation incorrect.
I think that providing an exit status that is not 0 when zcat is used with an uncompressed file is useful. Though my opinion is less strong regarding whether it should write more text after an error occurred, it’s probably more useful for a process to terminate quickly when an error occurred rather than risk a second error occurring and making troubleshooting harder.
I think that trying to change any existing documented features of widely used utilities will lead to us having less useful software in the future (our time is probably better spent making new programs and new documentation): https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
You are correct. This probably produces something more similar to what you’d want the original command to do, but with better safely:
find -- . -type f -regex '^\./[^/]*$' -exec sh -c -- 'for file in "${@}"; do zcat "${file}" || cat "${file}" || exit; done' sh '{}' '+'
That assumes you want to interact with files with names like .hidden.txt.gz though. If you don’t, and only intend to have a directory with regular files (as opposed to directories or symbolic links or other types of file), using this is much simpler and even safer, and avoids using files in a surprising order:
for i in *; do zcat -- "$i" || cat -- "$i" || exit; done
Of course, the real solution is to avoid using the Shell Command Language at all, and to carefully adapt any program to your particular problem as needed: https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/safe-shell/
Remember that the system documentation can be different for different operating systems. For example, it’s notorious that the documentation for sed differs between GNU and macOS, particularly regarding the -i option: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4247068/sed-command-with-i-option-failing-on-mac-but-works-on-linux
In order to avoid surprises related to this, “POSIX.1-2024 defines a standard operating system interface and environment, including a command interpreter (or “shell”), and common utility programs to support applications portability at the source code level.” https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/ https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/sed.html
“10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty)” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_cat#Cultural_impact https://emperorx.bandcamp.com/album/10000-year-earworm-to-discourage-settlement-near-nuclear-waste-repositories
I definitely recognized “Huskvarna” for some reason, but didn’t know its location or why I would have recognized it before reading your comment. I haven’t lived in Sweden or a place that would have been very easy for me to get to Sweden from.
Programs that do multiple things are not simple, so successfully using or understanding what they do is less likely to be possible for you. I expect that wanting to avoid interacting with many programs will lead a person to use programs that are nonfree more often than they otherwise would, so it would be more likely that a program controls the users.
I can list some alternatives to Discord that you probably don’t know, and requirements for an alternative to Discord: https://degooglisons-internet.org/ https://framasoft.org/en/manifest https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/ https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/#criteria
Also consider https://soatok.blog/2024/08/04/against-xmppomemo/ https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-signal-competitor/ !privacy@lemmy.ml
Typo: s/FOUR\/FOR\/s/s\/FOUR\/FOR\//
To “substitute”, the editing command is s/RE/replacement/ which has a s character before any <slash> (/) character: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/utilities/sed.html#tag_20_109_13_03
Did something supercede Socialism in Russia around the years 1988 to 1991?
I think it’s important to consider that the GNU General Public License is really only a part of the Free Software Movement, which is “An effort by a group of people to achieve a social or political goal”. That movement is defined by a group of people and a goal and has “infrastructure”, such as “The Free Software Foundation” (“a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization”). “The idea of the Free Software Movement is that computer users deserve the freedom to form a community”, but if you want to accomplish a different goal, it might be useful to clearly communicate that goal to other people to create a different movement (and create new “infrastructure” to support your effort).
Changing only a part of the GNU General Public License might make it incoherent or otherwise a hindrance to your goal in a way that you might not expect. It might be better to focus on talking with other people about a goal of yours, and you might discover that you can be most effective without investing any energy in creating a new license for software, but if you determine that creating a new license is important you can create a comprehensive design for one to match your efforts more closely.
It seems that your goal might be summarized with “I want people to be able to help themselves (using software) without contributing to spreading hate” (“putting a motion in the positive is a rule in parliamentary procedures”).
See also “Chesterton’s Lamp-Post” (a suggestion to only start to act when you actually know what you want the final result to be) and “Chesterton’s fence” (a suggestion to not change things when you don’t know what the final result will be) for some context about what an undesirable design/plan is.