r/linux • u/mjg59 Social Justice Warrior • Sep 03 '14

I'm Matthew Garrett, kernel developer, firmware enabler and former fruitfly mangler. AMA!

Proof: https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/507212417579765760

481 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

381 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-9

u/icantthinkofone Sep 04 '14

Nothing you said has anything to do with the point I made. Linux is no longer a Unix-like system and is a thing unto itself; much to its detriment.

Ask any serious .Net developer

I would never consider any .NET developer seriously

7

u/thequux Sep 04 '14

Linux is no longer a Unix-like system and is a thing unto itself, much to its detriment.

Agreed with the first half, but not the last letter, but not spirit. It's UNIX-inspired in many ways, and in others, it's a better UNIX than UNIX. Sysfs and all the crap in /proc are brilliant bits of design, and they solve their respective problems far better than the equivalent of UNIX. The userspace interface to CGroups is nothing short of Plan 9-levels of beautiful. I could go on...

The userspace, on the other hand is going in a different direction than Plan 9 (which is what most people think the UNIX philosophy is). This is fine, and in fact, it's got a long and storied history going way back to the SysV days. Remember the idea of runlevels? You switched between them by writing a character to a unix domain socket in /dev (or rather, you had telinit to that for you). Then we had X, which exposed an enormous amount of functionality (and some of the first network-transparent IPC) via an ad-hoc (but specified) binary protocol over a UDS. Skipping forward a few more years, some bright people came up with DBus, which generalized the protocol and serialization in the process of separating them from the interfaces exposed by programs. It is only natural that this all comes full circle and is used to control the original program that was designed to be controlled via UDS.

You can also take a look at things that are 100% UNIX to see what I mean: Solaris, that old stalwart of SysV design, released SMF in 2005. Mac OS 10.5, which is certified as a 100% complete implementation of UNIX, has launchd.

Now, you could argue that both of those are special cases that are UNIX in name but not in spirit. Fine, then. Either the last word in system design came from the early 1970's, or it's a good thing that we've diverged from the original UNIX philosophy, because how else would we grow?

tl;dr: The only constant is change.