On 3/17/24 14:52, Oliver Webb wrote:
On Thursday, March 14th, 2024 at 12:04, enh <e...@google.com> wrote:
at a high level, it does seem like many/most people interpret "pending" as "almost done" (he says, being part
of the problem himself, having several pending things building and shipping on all Android devices) whereas in actual fact it can
mean anything from "yeah, actually pretty much done" to "will be completely rewritten" via "still just
trying random experiments trying to work out _how_ this should be rewritten".
sadly i don't have a better suggestion...
pending/experimental and pending/functional maybe, or something along that gist?
That would be my "not adding more complexity to manage transient clutter that
should instead go away" objection, already made.
Then again it'd make it harder to track the history of pending commands, adding
only new ones
to those 2 directories would fix that, but would make the organizational
problem for the old
ones worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_theorem_of_software_engineering
Stop. No. Halt. Wait. Hold it. Woah. Cease. Desist. Caution severe tire damage.
Klatu barata nikto. Subcalifragilisticexpialidocious.
a branch would be the usual git option, but that would probably mean "no pending
stuff in the main branch"
Also a problem if you want to switch Version Control systems or distribute
tarballs without a .git/ directory.
I already DID switch version control systems (from mercurial to git), and I
already distribute release tarballs. Why do you think these are new issues?
It'd hide these commands too,
I want to close tabs. I am not creating additional scaffolding for clutter
management:
$ ls -d */toys
clean3/toys clean8/toys github/toys kl4/toys kl9/toys toybox/toys
clean5/toys clean.old/toys kl10/toys kl6/toys kleen/toys
clean6/toys clean/toys kl2/toys kl7/toys kl/toys
clean7/toys debian/toys kl3/toys kl8/toys release/toys
I already try not to publish quite as much clutter as accumulates locally.
There's some real fossils checked into the tree. I started work on gene2fs back
under busybox, checked in what I had to the toybox repo in 055cfcbe5b05 in 2007
and haven't LOOKED at it this decade because I just haven't gotten back around
to it. Since then they INVENTED EXT4. (I still hope to get back to it, but at
the moment I'm answering email.)
For the first time I checked if there were any special branches in the repo
because
I didn't bother to think about that in the months I spent working on it.
i still struggle between "other" and "lsb" in particular.
Same here, I can remember the posix commands.
Can you? I still have to check some from time to time, and the definition of
whether "tar" is a posix command or not is outright eldrich bordering on
quantum.
But I don't care about LSB enough to
memorize everything in wants. And keeping all completed commands that aren't in
poisx,
lsb, networking or android
The "example" directory is important because it's the only other directory of
commands that should not "default y" in defconfig. It has a policy distinction.
Back in 2012, when the number of commands was growing fast and having one big
directory of them all was getting a bit busy, the alternative of sorting them
into directories was annotating them with tags, and THAT was a nightmare (of the
"this command has three tags" variety). And also implied future pressure to
extend the existing kconfig implementation to USE the tags, which would be
worse.
Moving them into subdirectories, with each command in ONE directory, and a
README explaining what the directory was for, with kconfig automatically
displaying them in menus and using the first line of the README as the menu's
title, seemed the least bad crowd control option at the time.
in a massive "other" folder sorta defeats
the purpose of these directories which are supposed to reduce clutter.
It wasn't really about reducing clutter. I mean yeas, back then some web viewers
wouldn't display more than 250 files in a directory, the way github truncates at
1000 today:
https://github.com/landley/linux/tree/master/arch/arm/boot/dts
But the goal was annotating command categories. Posix and pending are obvious,
and I mentioned example. Back when I split them up, LSB was still a viable
standard (the Linux Foundation hadn't destroyed it yet), and it STILL kind of
means "this command existed back in Y2K and was considered part of the base
system back then, even if posix never caught up". Several commands in pending
get promoted into LSB (such as most of the password stuff, although oddly
mkpasswd is NOT in lsb 4.1).
Hmmm, possibly instead of a dead standard the linux foundation killed, I should
instead check the $PATH of my old red hat 9 install from the dawn of time...
the only other environment I've noticed having a big selinux rule stack is
Red Hat. I haven't noticed a lot of selinux in debian, arch, gentoo, alpine,
buildroot... Even SuSE used apparmor instead, although they switched to selinux
recently because their business model is to be the Diet Red Hat so vendors have
a second source to solicit enterprise bids from, so there's business logic to
minimizing the delta between them regardless of technical merit (and spending
less maintaining parallel infrastructure just to sign things in triplicate).
I admit "toys/net" is a distinction that hasn't really worked out: I didn't even
put nbd_client.c and nbd_server.c in there. I could move all that into other I
suppose, if one less directory was worth making git log history less obvious...
And then everything that ISN'T in one of those groups needed a place to go,
hence "other". It's not ideal, but it was motivated by the number commands
continuing to increase and One Big Directory getting a bit busy, and needing a
place for "pending".
