On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 06:53:54PM -0400, Jude Nelson wrote:

[cut]

>
> I took a stab at stating what "Unix software design philosophy" means
> earlier up the thread, but I'll reproduce it here for your convenience:
>
> """
> 0. A program is a file that contains executable data (e.g. a binary, a
> script, or a library).
> 1. Each program has a single well-defined responsibility.
> 2. If two programs have orthogonal responsibilities, then they are
> logically independent of one another's implementation (i.e. programs with
> orthogonal responsibilities are not coupled to each other's
> implementations).
> 3. Functionality encompassing multiple responsibilities is obtained by
> composing two or more programs (such as through piping, I/O redirection,
> dynamic linking, and so on).
> """
>

Hi Jude,

yours are very good and solid points, but unfortunaely they are not
that useful in practice. Point 1 can be a problem for many software
packages/suites which deal with more than one thing. An example is a
desktop manager: would it be considered DOTATIW-compliant? :)

Point 2 has problems as well, because sometimes a package contains
several programs (the first example that comes to my mind is postfix,
but you have thousands of other examples out there) which are
orthogonal yet highly dependent on each other's implementation. And
none of us would like to say that postfix is overall not
DOTATIW-compliant...

Point 3 might be problematic as well, not just in the case of postfix
(which does not use piping or I/O redirection for inter-process
communication), but in hundreds of other programs that I am sure you
will consider definitely DOTATIW-compliant, but do not follow under
point 3 above.

In a word: stating a policy here is quite difficult, if not
impossible, and would soon require a relatively large number of
exceptions and smallprints in order to include software that you and
me and almost everybody here already would agree is DOTATIW- and
KISS-compliant. To rephrase an old saying, we can say that
DOTADIW-compliance is like pornography: you can't define it precisely,
but you immediately recognise it as soon as you see it ;-P

I think that the only concrete possibility is that of using a pinch of
salt whenever the choice between different alternatives is necessary
(if it ever is), and just go for the one that seems more reasonable,
where by "reasonable" I mean complying with almost all the points you
stated above, but also being in line with what a greybeard unix
user/admin would generally expect from a unix system, which is
something you can't just include in a bullet list ;-)

My2Cents

KatolaZ

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[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
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