OK.
Can we make journald have another configurable option? If it were
possible to simulate this this:
echo "Problem in the pit, Boss" | mail my_foreman
With something like
echo "Problem in the pit, Boss" | sendtojournald -also_mail my_foreman
Then you'd be able to get the people who like to send mail to
start sending mail in a way that gets them also using journald.
In addition, you could make it so that EITHER an MTA is installed
and /usr/bin/mail actuallly sends mail OR NO MTA is installed and
/usr/bin/mail is a symlink to journald which acts in many ways
like /usr/bin/mail, but which can optionally forward messages to
external mailservers.
That would be what I would call the traditional way of making such an
extension to linux. All new code strives to work with the simplified
old methods and understanding, and a more sophisticated user just gets
more functionality (albeit at a steeper learning curve). In some cases,
one would hope that the "new" way is actually a simpler or more
powerful way of doing things too.
What has been a bit scarey is seeing a trend towards making
things "harder" or more complex to learn and use without any obvious
benefit to the legacy user. We should strive to let a "pure text
console" user to at least be able to do the things they always used to do
at at least the same level that they used to work at.
Since many of the new generation don't use the command line very
much and don't really know what a good coder can do with command
line recall and scripting, they might be humble enough to at
least preserve those semantics as sacred until such time that
their chops are sufficient to understand the richness of the
environment.
A particularly funny circumstance is the program that
autoprobes any RS-232 device at a regular basis for the presence of a
modem. My god. This had some funny side-effects for anyone using
RS-232 and linux to control servo systems, 100KWatt-crystal-furnaces,
robots, and other such stuff. Sending binary characters out a generic
interface port to probe for the latest socially cool device probably
shouldn't have been put in the mainline code as a default.
If we progress forward in a way that honors the past, then we have a
chance of building a computing culture that has a chance of improving
not only on the short time scale, but the long time scale and which
works brilliantly as a GUI, but also as a text-based problem-solving and
programming platform.
OK. I'll stop now. This is perilously close to ranting. My apologies.
kind regards,
--
Rick Walker
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