The vi editor causes brain damage

Posted Aug 25, 2007 16:00 UTC (Sat) by pm101 (guest, #3011)
Parent article: The vi editor causes brain damage

His trolling aside, fundamentally, Marc was right. Regardless of technical reasons why it was done that way, and regardless of how hard/easy it is to fix, "rm *" not working on large directories is, fundamentally, brain-damaged, and someone ought to have fixed it before now. Most people's reaction to the troll was idiotic and immature at best.

The vi editor causes brain damage

Posted Aug 26, 2007 1:05 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

I'm pretty sure that most of the people responding were trolling themselves... I only saw 3-4 intelligent responses in that whole mess. Hardly surprising.

You ever see that cartoon where a wolf in a sheep's costume stands up in a field of other wolves wearing obvious sheep's costumes and shouts, "Wait! Isn't anybody here a sheep??" I'm afraid a lot of LKML threads turn into that.

The vi editor causes brain damage

Posted Aug 30, 2007 5:42 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (3 responses)

In the 'Unix haters' book (which is quite old), one of their criticism is that the globbing is done by the shell instead of having it done by each command (with a common library to avoid variation) which would prevent situation like this..

I doubt that Linux will be able to fix this kind of Unix legacy, it still doesn't have a versioned filesystem by default..

The vi editor causes brain damage

Posted Aug 30, 2007 6:17 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

While it's not quite perfect (the unexpanded glob pattern still gets passed back when no files could be found), "argument list too long" is fixed in 2.6.23. That goes a long way toward cleaning up this legacy.

And, does anything have a versioned filesystem by default? Even ZFS only has snapshotting. (Yes, I know VMS ruled for this... and only this.) If there really is huge demand for versioning (and I'm skeptical), it really doesn't seem too hard to add.

The vi editor causes brain damage

Posted Aug 30, 2007 9:51 UTC (Thu) by renox (guest, #23785) [Link] (1 responses)

>And, does anything have a versioned filesystem by default?

You answered yourself the question: VMS did.

> if there really is huge demand for versioning (and I'm skeptical)

There is really a huge demand for versioning, but it's hidden in the big number of 'how do I recover/undelete this file?' requests..

With a versioned filesystem, this would solve a big percentage of the issue except of course in case of hardware errors..

Sure you can say that loosing files is a motivation for doing proper backups, but as proper backups is still largely not done properly, it doesn't seem to work.

The vi editor causes brain damage

Posted Aug 30, 2007 16:48 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

And there are soooo many people clamoring for an undelete feature in Ext3 / Reiser, etc...? You claim huge demand but all I see is a sopradic email message and LOTS of people happily living with ext3's "I zero the block pointers, haha!" anti-undelete feature.

Have you actually used VMS? It's a perfect example of why versioned filesystems haven't caught on! Adding a semicolon to roll back in time was easy, yes, but then you'd have to become very intimate with PURGE or you'll blow your quota by the end of the day. And you thought keeping your home directory small was hard in Unix! :)

My position: everybody agrees that versioning would be extremely useful. The problem is, of course, it comes at a cost: performance, capacity, and maintenance. And nobody, not Microsoft, Sun, Apple, Be, Linus, etc have figured out how to reduce the cost to where it's actually worth it.

Hopefully we discover in October that Apple has finally solved this one. If they can show how to do it right, I'll bet Windows and Linux won't be far behind!