One very important section number is 5 - it's for file formats. So if you forget the crontab format, you need to invoke `man 5 crontab` to read about it.
In fact, the only reference to crontab(5) is in the SEE ALSO section (on my version anyway), but that doesn't say why you might want to see crontab(5), just that it exists. That is spectacularly useless
Depends. If one is aware of the meaning of section numbers, that "(5)" is very obviously suggesting that there is a file format named "crontab" which is documented. It's also pretty reasonable to suppose that the command and the file format of the same name are related.
A novice might miss the convention and the connection. Man pages are not quite novice material.
Maybe they could update man files so that it lists crontab(file format) instead of crontab(5)? Whenever I've seen numbered man pages in the past, I thought it was just a page number in the manual for the program
Hell, you don't even have to have a handle on what the section numbers mean for these things to be useful. The appearance of something in a "SEE ALSO" section indicates that the manual page author thought that that thing was both related to the thing being documented and worth reading if the current man page didn't answer all of your questions.
I can't count the number of times that following the trail laid out by 'SEE ALSO' sections a step or three has lead me to the exact thing that I never knew I needed to be using. Chasing those sections down is almost always well worth the three to ten minutes spent.
And, like, if one is expecting a man page to cover in detail everything even vaguely related to what it documents, and one doesn't feel one has ten minutes to spend reading things that people thought were important to bring to your attention... well, I guess one could go ask an LLM to slop out some related words. That'll probably take less than ten minutes, though correctness is not at all guaranteed.
That is incredibly stupid. A documentation system designed by someone who doesn't understand how people use documentation.
If man was designed by someone with any taste at all it would at least give you a menu to select (1) crontab command, (5) crontab file format. Maybe we need a rewrite in Rust to fix that.
And since man pages could take minutes to print out, if you needed one you'd tear that section of paper off and keep it in a binder for future (and faster) reference.
Programs these old are controlled by people who are very strongly opposed to change, even if it improves things. They like living in the 80s.
I absolutely guarantee if you propose this change the the GNU neckbeards who control man they will come up with some bullshit technical reason why it can't be done.
Not that I know of, but I haven't looked. I have written a similar program for pulling arm64 instruction pages (which have many duplicates), the whole thing is under 100 lines, and most of that is printing and file IO that would be handled by the manpager, the actual finding dups and presenting a menu is even simpler.
And maybe we need some versions: man version 1, man version 2 and so on. And of course, in the style of GTK, each one incompatible with all the others. Progress. /s
Incidentally, man --help on my machine shows "-k, --apropos equivalent to apropos", which isn't very useful. I know the two are equivalent, because they're on the same line of switches, what does it actually do?
With some further man digging, apropos is actually a separate program that looks through man page names/descriptions for the argument. Unless you run it with no arguments, in which case it just outputs "apropos what?" Instead of an actual error message like "No search term provided" or something
> Incidentally, man --help on my machine shows "-k, --apropos equivalent to apropos", which isn't very useful.
That's your hint to execute either 'man apropos' or 'man man'. Both tell you in detail what the flag and utility do.
You seem likely to be very disappointed in the '-h'/'-H' output of utilities from the BSD tradition. The output is often a list of all of the (almost always exclusively short) options presented as a sea of characters... and nothing else.
I mean, most of the -h/--help texts I've read are generally pretty good. Obviously not a full documentation for the program, but they tell you what the switches do. I wish there was a consensus on whether to use -h or --help though
GNU didn't kick anything off. It was an attempt to document something that was already in full swing.
What was in full swing was Open Source, powered by scratch-your-own-itch. What was taking time was for the business world to learn the lessons by both carrot (Linux) and stick (Unix Wars, vendor lock-in, dozens of crappy competing standards). When Steve Balmer winds up using your language, you moved the ball.
Many ideas from The Cathedral & The Bazaar made it into The Lean Startup. The Cathedral development model was more related to waterfall. YC was already chugging along, but you can bet your ass PG was already steeped in the tea.
You are arguing theology about who the cathedral metaphor was aimed at. The primary sources from ESR's own flagship pre-CatB project are public and open to examination.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Netnews (TMNN) was ESR's failed magnum opus, a solo netnews rewrite: long private work, one rough beta, then done. That is the isolated cathedral process CatB later criticised when it was other people's work. The tree from the historic tmnn7-8.tar.Z is here:
Read the LICENSE as evidence, not as law homework: anti-censorship language, FSF distancing, GPL-style terms, and a consulting pitch labeled as an unabashed commercial plug inside the license text:
Then read fascist.c: real filename, FASCIST and COMMUNIST compile switches, suppress/deny and ADM/authorized rules for who may post or read. That is operator gatekeeping in code, not a metaphor.
ESR talks in that LICENSE like the speech police are the enemy. In the same distribution, fascist.c is the speech police: it encodes who may post, who may read, site suppressions, and deny rules off an authorized file. That is not a subtle contradiction. It is the same person packaging a freedom sermon with operator-controlled posting and reading. Calling that anything other than hypocrisy is charity he did not earn.
Stating facts is nice, but the conclusion you're trying to get to is just a tangent about ESR. In 1988. How do you relate this to arguments I made?
> later criticised when it was other people's work
Seems like first-hand learning and applying those lessons to more relatable projects, such as those after 1988? Are we still a society that rewards learning or must all mistakes be worn permanently and shamefully so that the malcontents can endlessly self-validate in their misery?
The authz language is pretty funny. Free speech has always been self-inconsistent. If I may use my free speech to organize a fascist takeover of society, is free speech without limit not potentially a tool of its own destruction? If one is, as ESR is, so concerned with free speech, would there not then be a need for authz? If you argue that controls on free speech are a hypocrisy, isn't that also what a fascist would argue while angling to eliminate barriers to the use of free speech so that they can use it to end free speech?
The license is fun. I'm sure I have equally amusing writings stashed away somewhere. Amid this evidence of early tension, stewing, and ideological turmoil, I do sense within ESR a dissatisfaction with the FSF. Would this not foreshadow that CatB was later aimed at the FSF and that ESR was motivated for a long time and therefore, while he ultimately presented a different message informed by many other developments and a long time to think and refine, all along grappling with an irritation at something deep within the FSF that he could not reconcile with?
Doesn't this continue to argue in a very straight line that CatB was all about the FSF and that the cathedral development model's similarities to corporate waterfall were just incidental?
Speaking of first hand learning and applying those lessons: That's all very well and fine that you're using your free speech to speculate about the motives of ESR and his relationship to RMS, without having actually looked at any of the evidence yourself, but do you know either of them personally, and if so, for how long have you known them, and how often have you interacted?
Have you ever had to sit through ESR yapping at you relentlessly about TMNN in the 1980's? I have, and so have many of my friends from that era. It was all he would talk about at the time. He was notorious for his obsession with proselytizing about TMNN and trying to personally attack and tear down RMS's life's work. (Not to mention ESR's rank bouquet and Pepé Le Pew approach to women.)
And nobody wanted to work with ESR because he was an insufferable narcissist who didn't want to share his code with anyone, who wanted all the glory and bragging rights himself.
All he did was brag and brag like Trump bloviating about how smart he is, dissing all the competing software that was actually free and other people worked on and shared, without ever sharing his own code, or letting "many eyes" review it, over two full years, until he gave up on his TMNN project and never touched or spoke of it again.
There is literally a 365 line 3,135 word 19,560 character file in the TMNN source code called "doc/BRAGSHEET":
ESR's TMNN code wasn't a cathedral, a bazaar, or a mystery house -- it was a shanty town riddled with bugs and security holes far beyond the reach of "many eyes". I analyzed it with Claude: ~774 unsafe string call sites, 42 mktemp races, 61 shell-shaped holes, gets() normalized in a shared header. Review the code yourself if you don't believe me.
Imagine him cornering you at a science fiction convention and having to sit through him reciting that BRAGSHEET file to you again and again. It was his entire personality and discussion topic for two years (besides how much he hated RMS).
ESR's obsession is all about RMS personally, not just the EFF in general. His own TMNN license and my own personal first hand experience proves it. Have you ever discussed it with RMS himself, or even anyone else involved in the Free Software Foundation, or seen both of them interact in person? I have. I still communicate with RMS occasionally -- the last time he emailed me was a couple weeks ago.
I'm speaking from first hand knowledge and direct personal experience over decades. I'm not speculating and hallucinating and trying to carry ESR's water like you are, without knowing either of them personally.
If people actually bothered to look at any of his code, and the reactions of people knowledgeable at the time to his code (and/or his intellectual bloviations), the damage to "open source" would be so thorough that we'd probably all be using Microsoft products for an indefinite period. However, it's far easier to just nod your head and pretend he's very smart (in that reddit sort of way).
Personally, I love reading about people's reactions to the abomination of fetchmail, although my absolute favorite is him yapping with pride that he has code in basically everything -- which is ESRspeak for him writing libgif. Of course, dig down into that and you'll find he didn't write anything... he ported an MSDOS library someone else had written. Many such cases.
That's so wonderful. Glad you got your grievance's about ESR off your chest. Hopefully in the following forty years, you will be able to move on from events from the previous forty years.
It's all still supporting the accuracy of my statement, that CatB was more about the FSF than anything.
Do you have some grievances for me or was damning ESR supposed to make me self-destruct?
Arguably Linux wouldn’t have happened absent GNU although a lot of people I know argue that BSD would have eventually evolved to someplace like where Linux is today in spite of various legal and community factors holding it back.
I used a similarly shaped argument with different nouns to highlight the ambiguity, and now you see why that's problematic. Don't just make blind assertions without linking it back to some concrete, at least arguing that some mechanism was *dominant*.
Mapped to modern concepts I'd say it was about iterating from a MVP.
"Gabriel argued that early Unix and C, developed by Bell Labs, are examples of the worse-is-better design approach." Whereas vibe-coding is not reviewing what code goes in, just judging it by whether it seems to work or not. I guess a common factor would be willingness to compromise on soundness.
It wasnt one thing, gnu is a case of cathedrals. Corps are usually more cathedrally than bazaary because of their hierarchical top down structure, but ymmv, an elon musk or steve jobs company will be more cathedral than a conglomerate like unilever or a google or microsoft
I will not sit here idly as you disparage an entire kingdom of diverse, beautiful, highly efficient, decentralized problem-solvers. Some of my best friends are slime molds.
Not really. From the essay: “I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.”
So the Unix-philosophy small tools that constitute an important part of the GNU project are excluded. Rather, it’s about any programs of significant complexity, like Emacs (and likely GCC) and many commercial products. While the cathedral model doesn’t imply closed source, it implies building “in […] isolation”, rather than in the open. It may or may not remain proprietary and/or closed source.
Linux demonstrated to ESR that complex projects can also be built in the open with many collaborators, and don’t necessarily require the cathedral; which inspired the essay.
What I'm saying "not really" to is the claim that the "cathedral" does only refer to the GNU project and not to proprietary closed source. This is not the case. It refers to certain portions of GNU, as well as to certain segments of proprietary closed source. Neither GNU nor proprietary closed source is a criterion for the "cathedral". The criterion is the size and complexity of the software, independent of whether it is proprietary or not, or closed source or not.
GNU follows the Unix philosophy. ESR wrote The Art of Unix Programming [0] in which he writes extensively about it. GNU was envisioned to be a clone of Unix [1].
> The criterion is the size and complexity of the software
The criterion is the development process, not the complexity. Linux is complex, but not a Cathedral.
I don't want to split hair with your words more. For context, FSF hard liners since the dawn of the OSI were distorting the meaning of CatB to deflect criticism from themselves. FSF supporters also very successfully promoted "FLOSS" instead of bare _OSS, giving lots of later-comers the illusion that "free/libre" was an expansion pack for OSS when OSS came later, a very intentional evolution of the dogmatic "free" software movement.
The choice of "Cathedral" is an extremely obvious symbol when you consider the Protestant reformation as a defiance of Vatican, an overly central system where decisions can only flow from the top. There are a lot of metaphors ESR could have chosen from, but the "cathedral" rhymed with the undertones of the real tension between the many OSS practitioners who have divers motivations and the FSF's plan to slap GNU stickers on every piece of software on Earth while blessing their own cardinals at the FSF Vatican and excommunicating any dissent. Given that kind of very overt signalling, it's just not defensible to argue any other primary target than the FSF and the overly central development process they were dependent on to maintain control over projects.
> The computer contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes, which were cooled by 80 air blowers. More than 30 meters long, it filled a 9 m by 15 m room and weighed about 30 kilograms. It consumed as much electricity as a small town.
I still remember the CRT TV we had at home when I was kid. It was big but almost empty.
Vacuum tubes break too often. Once per year? But if you have a thousand of them you have to change one very often. So I guess they have a lot of space for humans repairing it.
There's also the possibility that we, as consumers, demand that the political system solves this issue with robust privacy legilsation that prohibits any entity from tracking our phones.
Democratic ones do. But for 95% of causes it's hard to become so loud that they are forced to respond.
That's exactly why orgs like EFF exist. Most laws also aren't passed because of overwhelming consumer feedback. It's lobbied by special interests. Which sadly took a negative connotation over the last few decades, but lobbies can be for the people too.
Studies show if 0% of the American population support a bill, it's 30% likely to be passed, and if 100% of the American population support it, it's 30% likely to be passed. Is America democratic?
I'm getting to the point where I believe representative democracy on the scale of hundreds of millions of people just doesn't work all that well. I've never been one of those "states' rights" people, but these days I am becoming convinced that the US should have a much smaller federal government, and states, counties, cities, and towns should have more autonomy in deciding their fates.
This is not an easy problem to solve. Certainly I want more things at the federal level than the authors of the constitution envisioned (currency, international diplomacy, military, etc.): some things really need to be done at the national level (like environmental regulation).
Anyway. Sure, those figures may be true for the US Congress (or not, I haven't verified), but I bet you those figures aren't even close to true for town and city councils and county government. And perhaps not even state government as well.
We could also demand that the government doesn't use the location data from private companies without a warrant, but elections aren't often granular enough to satisfy individual requirements. Better to figure out a way to create and use a competitor that doesn't do this to you.
UK uses "imperial gallons", which are no more metric than US customary gallons. Expanded to 3 decimals, a UK/imperial gallon is 4.546L, and a US customary gallon is 3.786, and a US gallon is close to 3.8L, than a imperial gallon is to 4.5L.
The point was more that the female characters turn up in books two and three. Three in particular.
If you like SF you can't go wrong reading all of Asimov IMO. The entire Robots/Empire/Foundation series is fantastic. It doesn't mean you can't also read other, "better" SF either. Asimov's main SF work will take a few months to read at most.
Are you referring to the literal planet rather than a woman? That character felt particularly of self insert fantasy (oo a hot 20 year old in love with the aged professor).
Regardless, stopping at the first book is a good recommendation. Asimov demonstrated he didn't understand what made his own work interesting. Granted mystery boxes are hard, but he took an immediate about-face on psychohistory and retconned any bit of intrigue with rather vanilla stuff. The first book is outstanding.
I read books because I enjoy them. I enjoy reading about hot 20 year olds and big breasted women in space actually. Women are allowed to have 50 Shades, I'm allowed to enjoy books too.
You are. And I'm allowed to read into the author's psychology when they wear it on their shoulder. And I'm also allowed to critique the author when they misunderstand their work and write rambling, uninspired sequels that ruin the original work.
Lucas and Disney couldn't help but copy even these bad parts of Foundation in the Star Wars prequels and sequels.
I've never understood this. The beauty of recorded media is authors cannot ruin or revoke their work, assuming no actual censorship, of course (copyright can also be a problem). Just ignore the subsequent works if you don't like them. This is the first time I'm hearing about people only reading the first Foundation book but it's definitely worth doing some quick checks before dedicating one's finite time to reading/watching/listening to anything.
The trilogy, prequels, and sequels are all "canon" and retcon the most interesting concepts of the original book as ruses, conspiracies, and lies. This is unambiguously a ruining of the original because the author went out of their way to mute the concepts rather than explore them.
The first book Orwell wrote is pretty good as well. Down and out in paris and london. It's a good picture of life in the slums at the time, and much more raw than other accounts - Orwell seems to have simply recounted his experiences.
It's a bit low for Asimov to just say Orwell was slumming it like a modern hippie. He was slumming it like in the olden days, and starved for weeks.
One very important section number is 5 - it's for file formats. So if you forget the crontab format, you need to invoke `man 5 crontab` to read about it.
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