[GRLUG] Documentation

[Bob Kline]

Agreed.

   -- Bob


On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 1:37 PM, John-Thomas Richards <jtr at jrichards.org>wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 12:59:46PM -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> > On Tue, 2011-02-22 at 12:41 -0500, Bob Kline wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> > > In the early days of Unix the philosophy was to have simple commands
> > > that did one thing well.
> >
> > It is common to position this as a philosophy;  I don't accept that
> > there was every much of a philosophy behind UNIX (which LINUX isn't,
> > LINUX is a work-alike).  UNIX is primarily a heaping pile of pragmatic
> > compromises - most of which work extremely well and many of which are
> > creaky.
>
> There is a UNIX philosophy.  It is exactly as I stated: create simple
> applications that do one or two (or a few) things well.  mutt is a great
> example.  mutt is a mail user agent.  mutt focuses on reading mail.
> Period.  Because of this, mutt does not have its own internal MTA.  mutt
> does not have its own editor.  Many use vim or joe or nano or some other
> editor along with it because mutt focuses on its primary raison d'être:
> reading mail.  That's UNIX-y.
>
> Many early (I started using Linux in 1997) apps followed this philosophy
> (many still do).  For example, a number of CD- or DVD-ripping apps are
> just front-ends that combine a number of CLI-driven apps.  Why write
> software to encode when LAME does it well?
>
> > > I think it was even put something like that.  Commands were piped so
> > > the user could build up the exactly function needed at the time, and
> > > one uses aliases to save often used sequences.
> >
> > Most of what you describe above is a function of the shell; and not
> > unique to UNIX.
>
> Pipes are what make the UNIX philosophy possible.  It's a way to connect
> together the simple apps that do one or two things well, whether it's a
> function of the shell or not.  Could one create an application that
> searches the filesystem for files that match one's regular expression
> and puts the matches into a file?  Sure, but why?  There are apps that
> can do different pieces of that.  Pipes string 'em together.
>
> [snip]
> --
> john-thomas
> ------
> The shorter a word, the more meanings it has.
> Paul A Delaney, meteorologist
>
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