how I remember the history
how I remember the history
Posted Apr 6, 2021 13:09 UTC (Tue) by acahalan (guest, #151496)In reply to: Yes, procps from /proc ps by michaelkjohnson
Parent article: Killing off /dev/kmem
Based on that, Michael K Johnson wrote the procps.
Somebody else ended up maintaining procps for a while, adding color to the output, but then not much happened.
Michael K Johnson, then at Red Hat, decided (was told?) to maintain procps. He reverted to the pre-color version of the code. He put out a call for help, and Albert Cahalan responded with the suggestion that ps support both BSD and SysV syntax like OSF/1 (later renamed Tru64 then Digital UNIX) and AIX did. This would have been 1996 probably, or perhaps 1997. Sorted output was possible, but I don't believe it was the default. It should not be the default, mainly because ps is often used when a system is low on memory but also because partial output is desirable when running on a failing kernel. Sorting with the "O" option appears to have a BSD origin.
Albert Cahalan rewrote procps, initially just to prove that it would be possible to go beyond what OSF/1 and AIX could do, parsing mixed BSD and SysV options. (OSF/1 could only do one or the other, not mixed) There was then some human conflict relating to "ps -aux" printing a warning. Craig Small over at Debian started using Albert Cahalan's new code. This code definitely did not sort by default.
Michael K Johnson turned over a CVS repository to Rick van Riel and Ingo Molnar, excluding Albert Cahalan without explanation. This was almost certainly in 1997. Albert Cahalan then put a version 3.x.x on sourceforge, where he maintained procps for about a decade. At some point the 2.x.x version was made unreliable, grouping processes as threads if they happened to share various attributes as procps non-atomically looked at them. Albert Cahalan instead enhanced the /proc filesystem by adding the /proc/*/task/ directories and the thread counts. All distributions, including Red Hat, switched over to Albert Cahalan's procps 3.x.x code.
After about a decade maintaining procps, Albert Cahalan became too busy due to a large family. Also, he was demotivated because he found that it was impossible to stop Red Hat from hacking things up in ways that would add bugs and ill-considered compatibility troubles. This led to Craig Small, the Debian package maintainer, joining up with some other people to start the 4.x.x version series elsewhere.
Posted Apr 7, 2021 2:10 UTC (Wed)
by michaelkjohnson (subscriber, #41438)
[Link] (1 responses)
Branko Lankester built kmem ps that came earlier.
In the earliest procps version I found (0.7), I already tried to honor at least SysV arguments e and f for people whose fingers had been trained on SysV, but provided BSD-style output regardless. Your rewrite implemented multiple personalities, which was naturally much better.
It looks like I introduced sorting output in version 0.93 in April 1994, later than I recalled, but before I was aware of you doing work on procps. That version definitely sorts by default, and the "o" option toggles sorting. I also clearly failed to update the man page along with that new feature.
Your memory of the transition is different from mine. I was doing a poor job of being maintainer (slow to apply patches and do new releases) but I certainly didn't "revert" color support, though I suspect it was there in a patch or fork that I hadn't adopted. A fork was the obvious response to an unresponsive maintainer, so no complaints there! I did finally step back formally.
Posted Apr 8, 2021 21:17 UTC (Thu)
by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576)
[Link]
Took me a moment to look at the poster's names and realize they were the very people involved.
Posted Apr 8, 2021 3:58 UTC (Thu)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link]
export I_WANT_A_BROKEN_PS=shutup
Being part of my .profile on Linux for many years. At some point around 2012 I realized I didn't need it anymore.
Well, we remember some different things...
Well, we remember some different things...
how I remember the history