Invisible wrote:
> The trouble with Windoze is that *everything* is one gigantic lump. (And 
> it's a very buggy, undocumented and unreliable lump at that.)

No, it's just a bunch of tightly-coupled pieces you have to be a 
programmer to get at. Instead of using files to pass around data, 
windows uses APIs. And it isn't especially undocumented. It just costs 
money to go to the classes that teach you the stuff properly, and there 
isn't source code available.

It's not like IIS is less documented than Apache, or the Windows 
graphics stuff is less documented than X-Windows.

> Why can't somebody build an OS with a *sane* level of granularity?? What 
> would be so hard about that?

Because one size doesn't fit all?

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> chkdsk

It's actually not even chkdsk at boot time. It's autochk, which is a 
different program to do the same thing. And the recovery console has yet 
a different version. Why they felt the need to implement it three times 
I don't understand. :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:11:59 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> But if I wanted it to work all the time, I'd write it in C and be done
>> with it - then the shell doesn't come into play. :-)
> 
> Yah, as I said, when it gets messy, I use Tcl. :-)

Really the best option - remove the shell. :-)

Jim

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> And you need to look up again the definition of "DLL Hell".

You know, they solved this problem quite some time ago... Like, around 
2000 or earlier.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> You've been lucky.  Last company I worked for had many applications with 
> DLLs in common but requiring different versions. 

FWIW, that's actually easy to fix. You just put the right version of the 
DLL next to each executable, and create a file in the same directory 
with a magic name (that I disremember offhand but something like 
"loadseparate"), and the DLL loader will look at the directory with the 
executable first for any DLL.  It's the same thing that the 
"side-by-side" is supposed to solve, so googling for that would probably 
lead you to the right place.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Darren New wrote:
> Now, if Linux supported the thing that NTFS supports where you can 
> delete the beginning of a file, maybe I'd use that. But as it is, I have 
> to chop the file up so I can delete parts of it.
> 

Could "split" possibly help you?

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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Chambers wrote:
> When you're writing a single, simple tool, with well defined inputs and 
> outputs, it's much easier to make it work *no matter what*. 

I saw a study done a number of years ago where researchers took each 
UNIX tool and piped random data into its input. The only ones that 
didn't dump core were programs that didn't care (e.g., cat) or programs 
specifically designed to parse its input (e.g., gcc).  Something like 
70% of the tools they tested dumped core.

A couple years later, it was all cleaned up or at least vastly improved, 
apparently.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:34:28 +0000, Invisible wrote:

>>> Who said anything about the kernel? I'm talking about the entire Linux
>>> OS. (Most of which is actually GNU, if you want to be technical about
>>> it...)
>> 
>> So yes, be technical about it, then - I don't know of any Linux distro
>> that uses "standard" tools that aren't GNU, be it awk, sed, perl, bash,
>> etc.
> 
> Except that Unix /= Linux. There's also BSD and Solaris and random stuff
> like that... and autoconf works with all of them.

Yes, I'm aware - have used Solaris, BSD, and SYSV.  And autoconf is there 
to make sure what's there.

> "Windoze" is more or less one product line. Binaries work unmodified on
> most versions of it. (Assuming the features they use are there.) "Unix"
> is not one product. It's not even close to being one product. It's a
> vast stew of different products all bolted together in a giant mess.

An OS can be called a "UNIX System" only if it meets certain standards, 
as defined by The Open Group.  So right away, you're operating under a 
fallacy that you can compare UNIX to Windows - Windows is a product, UNIX 
is a set of standards that define the operation of a product.

Microsoft occasionally deigns it's OK to follow standards they didn't 
define - they use the BSD TCP/IP stack in most versions of Windows; they 
follow (to a greater or lesser extent) standards for web browsing 
software; they even have in the past (not sure about today) incorporated 
a POSIX-compliant subsystem.  They don't own any of these standards, but 
they use them.

>>> I have yet to experience "DLL Hell". I'm told it exists, and it's not
>>> fun, but I haven't seen it personally. (Don't ask me why...)
>> 
>> You've been lucky.
> 
> Let's hope it stays that way...

The longer you work in IT, the less likely it is to happen.

Jim

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On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:33:41 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> chkdsk
> 
> It's actually not even chkdsk at boot time. It's autochk, which is a
> different program to do the same thing. And the recovery console has yet
> a different version. Why they felt the need to implement it three times
> I don't understand. :-)

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.  Last time I did something like this 
with Windows, it was Partition Magic that inserted itself into the boot 
process.

Jim

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Invisible wrote:
> ad-hoc *mess* of haphazardly interacting command switches that you have 
> to spend 20 minutes studying the manpage to decode the interactions for?

Don't forget that it also changes behavior depending on whether it 
things stdout is a terminal, a different character device, or a file.

> Also: autoconf exists. Need I say more?

And ptys.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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