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Re: '>;' redirection operator


From: Pierre Gaston
Subject: Re: '>;' redirection operator
Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2011 18:38:02 +0200

On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 5:08 PM, Bill Gradwohl <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 5:34 PM, Thorsten Glaser <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> People complain about the readability of code enough already, and as
>> practice shows, things like [[ have been around and nobody uses them
>> anyway (often using just POSIX, but not even knowing – myself included
>> – that POSIX sh has $((…))⁺; or even using less-than-POSIX, e.g. in
>> autoconf, which means that anything we were to introduce now would not
>> be used in the places where it counts anyway, for compatibility).
>>
>
>
> I'm a professional software developer (operating system internals mostly),
> but I have no standing in your group. However, I'd like to provide a hint
> as to why features aren't known about or used. I agree that adding new
> capabilities would largely be a wasted effort unless the most serious BASH
> deficiency is addressed first. It's the documentation - or lack of it
> PROPERLY done. Adding features that only your core group knows about might
> be "scratching your own itch", but does little to help the average end user
> unless its PROPERLY documented.
>
> The man page is written the way Robbie the Robot used to speak in the old
> black and white TV days. Short, cryptic and in many cases unintelligible IN
> THE DETAILS. Alternatively, one might snicker that some lawyer wrote it to
> purposely make it difficult to understand. As with most of the
> documentation I've seen in the Linux community, it's awful.
>
> What's documented may indeed be the truth, but its not the whole truth, and
> lacks so many of the details, the finer points, as to make what's written
> of little value in and of itself. I find myself experimenting
> (experimenting - euphemism for wasting lots of valuable time) with test
> scripts precisely because the documentation largely just hints at what's
> possible.
>
> The only people with the expertise to write proper documentation are the
> authors / maintainers of the actual code base. Anyone else trying to do
> that job without a thorough understanding of what the code actually says,
> would be guessing in many cases, and would produce a sub optimum product.
> Better perhaps than what is available now, but still not what it could be.
>
> The single largest failing in BASH, and in most of what's available open
> source, is the documentation.
>
>
> --
> Bill Gradwohl

nice troll.



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