[arch-general] [Bulk] Re:RFC: OpenRC as init system for Arch

Patrick Lauer patrick at gentoo.org
Mon May 7 10:25:41 EDT 2012


On 04/30/12 15:22, Nicolas Sebrecht wrote:
> The 29/04/12, Patrick Lauer wrote:
>
>> In my opinion,  if I have to start hacking random C to add or adapt
>> features (which happens as soon as the builtins do the wrong things -
>> that's about twice a year for me) it'll be a lot more crashy than a
>> simple shell script where I add one line of code.
> Having most of the distribution maintainers playing in with boot
> critical shell scripts is worse. I've been faced with so many poorly
> written shell scripts over distributions for decades that I can't
> believe in your "C is more crashy" statement.
>
SRSLY?

You misread my statement (I said if *I* have to write C blindly it'll be
crashy, I'm quite confident about that)

And claiming that someone like Lenny who doesn't even use comments and
uses memcpy instead of strcpy writes better code than the admins that
you usually don't even notice because their stuff is just working (so
you have no reason to even look for them) .... sigh. That's marginally
rude and inconsiderate.

Lastly, claiming that shell is bad because people write bad code ...
most code is bad. If you get bored, please, read all 12 lines of the
Gentoo rsyncd init script and tell me how it is buggy, unmaintainable
etc. :)
(bonus: out of those 12 4 are comments (including shebang) and 2 are
whitespace)

So all in all you just managed to upset some greybeards and turned a
technical discussion into random ad hominems. Nice :)

So anyway. If you complain about bad shell, fix it, or throw some
examples at me so I can rewrite them cleanly. Don't think rewriting in
Modula-3 will make it any better, the same people you condemned for not
writing good shell won't write good INTERCAL either. Educate them, fix
any bug you find, enjoy.

Have fun,

Patrick


More information about the arch-general mailing list