Like a daemon

[Phil Carmody]

[snip]

Like a daemon, touch(1)'d for the very first time,
Like a daeee-eee-eee-ee-mon, but the scheduler's gone offline...

So I'm not the only one who thought that, huh?

Far from it.

At least I had the
good sense not to post it.
Shame!

Of course, my version used fork(2).

Ditto.

Phil

 

[John Bode]

[snip]

Like a daemon, touch(1)'d for the very first time,
Like a daeee-eee-eee-ee-mon, but the scheduler's gone offline...

So I'm not the only one who thought that, huh?  At least I had the good
sense not to post it.  

Of course, my version used fork(2).

Can't help it, I've always been weak-willed.

 

[John Kelly]

the existence of prior art has, as far as I can tell, never been
a big deal with regarding to giving code feedback. Nobody tells a
"hello world" guy not to bother because it's already been done.

An artist creates what he wants. Undesirable prior art is irrelevant
for copyright purposes. I wrote dh from scratch and gave it an Apache
license.

Perhaps that disturbs certain GPL adherents. I have observed Debian
advocates demonstrating fanatical zeal for it.

Invading the two character namespace with a distro tool like debhelper
was poor judgement. It should be self evident that distro tools need
longer names. If Ubuntu uses debhelper, they may rename it for brand
identity and consistency. Debian is not important. Their mistake does
not hinder my work.

The daemon helper, a universal tool suitable for many *NIX variants, has
its place in the two character namespace; dh is its name.

ftp://ftp.isp2dial.com/users/jak/src/dh/

 

[Seebs]

An artist creates what he wants. Undesirable prior art is irrelevant
for copyright purposes. I wrote dh from scratch and gave it an Apache
license.

Perhaps that disturbs certain GPL adherents. I have observed Debian
advocates demonstrating fanatical zeal for it.

Actually, no one cares what license you give for it, because it's
fundamentally useless.

Invading the two character namespace with a distro tool like debhelper
was poor judgement.

And invading it with a personal-use-only tool, carefully constructed to
violate established practice, was actually worse judgement.

It should be self evident that distro tools need longer names.

It might be now. It wasn't especially in 1997. The practice is widespread
of using short names; consider "yum".

If Ubuntu uses debhelper, they may rename it for brand
identity and consistency.

But they don't.

Debian is not important.

Debian has provided one of the highest-quality stable *nix distributions
available for a decade or so. You have provided nothing of value.

Your narcissism is fascinating.

Their mistake does not hinder my work.

But your mistake does. By giving your program this name, and sticking to
it, you've done several things:

1. You've made your program useless to millions of prospective users.
2. You've established yourself as a narcissist who does not work well
with others.

The former is actually probably secondary in impact to the latter.

The daemon helper, a universal tool suitable for many *NIX variants, has
its place in the two character namespace; dh is its name.

It's not universal, though. It's highly-tuned for your personal
idiosyncracies and complete lack of familiarity with UNIX, C, background
processes, and real-world workflows. Furthermore, it's simply not something
that people use often enough to merit a short name. Short names are used
for utilities which are likely to be typed very often. "cc", "mv", things
like that -- things you might type a hundred times in a day.

In the average day, the number of times I do something remotely similar
to what dh does is probably *nearly* one. If we were to extend the field
to the general case of background tasks, it would be dozens -- but for
the vast majority of them, I explicitly *don't* want the background task
daemonized!

So it's useless. nohup ... & is more effective for most cases, and for
the cases when it isn't, there are better tools galore.

-s

 

[Dik T. Winter]

> So it's useless. nohup ... & is more effective for most cases, and for
> the cases when it isn't, there are better tools galore.

Shouldn't that actually be called 'nh'?

 

[Seebs]

Shouldn't that actually be called 'nh'?

No, the task is simply not useful enough to merit that level of namespace
pollution.

(That's one of the mysteries; I've never seen a workflow where a program
like this would be useful.)

-s

 

[John Kelly]

Shouldn't that actually be called 'nh'?

Good idea. Because in most cases, it's no help.

 

[Richard Bos]

Good idea. Because in most cases, it's no help.

Ah, so the d in dh stands for damn-all?

Webmail for Dialup Users

Oh, and... why oh why does this not surprise me?

Richard

 

[John Kelly]

Oh, and... why oh why does this not surprise me?

Oh my. I didn't know broadband users were the only ones allowed to code
and post it on Usenet. How RUDE of me. :-D

Richard

<plonk>

The daemon helper. dh is its name. It starts any program or script as
a daemon. It's not an environment like daemontools or launchd. It's a
configuration free utility with a short two character name, easy to use
interactively or in init scripts.

Be careful though. It has been known to bring demon possessed lunatics
screaming from their haunt among the tombs.

ftp://ftp.isp2dial.com/users/jak/src/dh/

 

[Seebs]

Oh my. I didn't know broadband users were the only ones allowed to code
and post it on Usenet. How RUDE of me. :-D

You didn't understand.

The daemon helper.

Makes a great meal?

Seriously, your insanity is not improving. No one will ever believe your
advertising spiel at this point. It's spam, you don't know what you're
doing, you're not willing to learn. This can never lead to any kind
of contribution or improvement. When you're willing to learn, and you want
to talk about things topical to newsgroups, go ahead and post. Otherwise,
you're spamming. Go away.

-s