Re: Adding a '-D date' option to `cat'

On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 05:56:16PM -0400, Garance A Drosehn wrote:
> There may already be a dozen ports which do this, but I'm not going to
> read through 12,500 port descriptions to find such a trivial tool.  I
> doubt anyone else does.

15661, but who's counting (OK, maybe I am).

Your point about our 'port browse' situation being suboptimal is a valid
one, though.

> It would be less work to write my own crappy script.

And that's the glory of Unix: your "neccessity" is my "crappy script".
And that's why we fight against bloat.

This may seem trivial to you, but the idea of "add options to basic
programs" is part of the mindset that leads to bewildering things like
gcc and OpenOffice.org.  I am not using hyperbole: the ability to say
"we are not going to add Feature X" is what distinguishes good engineering
from bloatware.

> And given the features *already* in `cat', which even the purists
> know they can not remove

Because of POLA: once a feature is added, you have to assume that some
script, somewhere, uses it.  Even with multi-year deprecation warnings
for things that turn out to be bad ideas, people still howl when you
turn that functionality off.

> I remain convinced that this is the most-helpful course of action for
> our freebsd users, even if it isn't Pure1980sUnix(TM).

Reasonable people disagree here.

My interpretation of the original Unix philosophy (often forgotten in
the morass of bloatware floating around on the 'net) is "small tools
which are easily understood and can be combined and extended".  That
philosophy is what keeps me interested in Unix rather than one of the
more "popular" approaches.

mcl