ugh.book

236 System Administration

(Unix NetSpeak is very bizarre. The vocabulary of the statement “the dae-

mon, which is supposed to service Thistle, was told that it should spawn a

child to connect to itself ” suggests that Unix networking should be called

“satanic incestuous whelping.”)

The rdist utility (remote distribution) is meant to help keep configuration

files in sync by installing copies of one file across the network. Getting it to

work just right, however, often takes lots of patience and lots of time:

From: Mark Lottor <[email protected]>

Subject: rdist config lossage

Date: Thursday, September 24, 1992 2:33PM

Recently, someone edited our rdist Distfile. They accidently added

an extra paren on the end of a line. Running rdist produced:

fs1:> rdist

rdist: line 100: syntax error

rdist: line 102: syntax error

Of course, checking those lines showed no error. In fact, those lines

are both comment lines! A few hours were spent searching the entire

file for possible errors, like spaces instead of tabs and such (of

course, we couldn’t just diff it with the previous version, since Unix

lacks version numbers). Finally, the extra paren was found, on line

110 of the file. Why can’t Unix count properly???

Turns out the file has continuation lines (those ending in \). Rdist

counts those long lines as a single line. I only mention this because

I’m certain no one will ever fix it; Unix weenies probably think it

does the right thing.

It’s such typical Unix lossage: you can feel the maintenance entropy expo-

nentially increasing.

It’s hard to even categorize this next letter:

From: Stanley Lanning <[email protected]>

Date: Friday, January 22, 1993 11:13AM

To: UNIX-HATERS

Subject: RCS

Being enlightened people, we too use RCS. Being hackers, we wrote

a number of shell scripts and elisp functions to make RCS easier to

deal with.