[HN Gopher] A System-Witch's Package Manager Murder Mystery
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       A System-Witch's Package Manager Murder Mystery
        
       Author : todsacerdoti
       Score  : 105 points
       Date   : 2022-04-11 11:11 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (artemis.sh)
 (TXT) w3m dump (artemis.sh)
        
       | calvinmorrison wrote:
       | It was Mr. Pottering in the plumbing with a NIH Pipebomb
        
       | lima wrote:
       | Nicely written!
       | 
       | This is a great illustration of how Bash and similar shell
       | dialects are convenient for interactive use but terrible as a
       | programming language.
       | 
       | Change my mind: Bash is the PHP of operating systems. Any Bash
       | script becomes tech debt the moment it is written.
        
         | timschmidt wrote:
         | That's unkind to PHP, which has grown into a relatively modern
         | language over the years.
        
       | int3rlop3r wrote:
       | The girl is a good writer. The boy has subscribed.
        
       | bo1024 wrote:
       | Nice detective work and entertaining
        
       | adamkurkiewicz wrote:
       | Entertaining and educational! Good job finding out the line of
       | kernel source code which causes the issue.
        
       | mg794613 wrote:
       | Nor sure what this article is trying to convey? Is it about
       | grepping wrong defaults for bash? Is it about mentioning the
       | protagonist as much as often? I've read it twice now, and I feel
       | ignorant.
        
         | faho wrote:
         | The environment variables count towards the argument limit. To
         | a casual shell user, this is non-obvious and typical error
         | messages are bad and don't even mention it. They say "Argument
         | list too long" even when the _argument list_ (argv) isn 't too
         | long, the environment list (envp) is.
         | 
         | So the author went through an investigation to figure out what
         | was happening, and decided to write down her findings.
         | 
         | ----
         | 
         | On a personal note, reading this caused me to look at fish's
         | error message in this case. It mentioned "environment list",
         | but tbh that's still too jargony and non-obvious.
         | 
         | So the next version of fish will now explicitly mention
         | "environment variables" in the error message here, and it will
         | print a hint if the environment variables account for over half
         | the limit.
        
           | ewalk153 wrote:
           | Nice to watch the gears of open source and open ideas turn.
        
       | quxpar wrote:
       | Delightful tone, something that feels both whimsical and
       | approachable.
        
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       (page generated 2022-04-13 23:02 UTC)