svn commit: r284198 - head/bin/ls

[Ian Lepore]

On Sat, 2015-06-13 at 11:38 -0400, David Chisnall wrote:
> On 13 Jun 2015, at 11:17, Ian Lepore <ian at freebsd.org> wrote:
> > 
> > If you would have told me a year ago that you had a simple scheme that
> > could make 30 years of experience maintaining code for unix-like systems
> > completely worthless I would have been skeptical, but it seems we're
> > well on our way.
> 
> There is a lot of heckling and unhelpful hyperbole in this thread.  Reading the xo_emit format strings takes a little bit of getting used to, but the same is true of printf - it’s just that we’re already used to printf.  The structured parts (xo_open_container, xo_close_container and friends) are clear and descriptive.  The changes are fairly invasive, but the benefits are also very large for anyone who is wanting to automate administration of FreeBSD systems.
> 
> If you have suggestions for how the libxo APIs could be improved, then please let us know - Phil is very reception to suggestions but objections along the lines of ‘it’s not what I’m used to and changes sometimes break things so we should never have changes’ are not helpful.
> 

"This is a piece of crap that needs to be excised from the system and
done a different way" is useful input whether you agree with it or not.
The idea that someone does not have the right to point out a huge
mistake simply because they don't have a patchset in hand is pure BS.

But, this is what you get when a disagreement about design is "solved"
by someone pointing out that project policy has always been "he who
commits first wins the design discussion" and that's pretty much what
happened when all of this was being discussed.

-- Ian