On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 01:55:43PM +0200, Lennart Poettering wrote: > > - 'systemctl --all' pages by default when the output is to tty. This > > consumes 50-60+ lines of potentially bug-prone code, and irks the > > crap out of me as a system administrator. systemctl's jurisdiction > > ends at stdout. > > Well, I think in genreal the autopaging behaviour of git and other tools > is very much appreciated. If you hate that behaviour then you are > probably in the minority, and we have to agree to disagree on the > benefits of this behaviour. Setting "alias systemctl='systemctl > --no-pager'" is not particularly hard though. Setting aliases does not remove cruft code, or documentation for flags which don't need to exist. Flags should be used to enable functionality, not disable bloat. > > - The same command outputs column headers on tty, and no headers > > otherwise. This is inconsistent. If I am outputting to a file, or > > perhaps a printer, and want headers on my non-tty output, I have to > > add them myself since there is no flag to force them on non-tty > > channels. If I don't want them and they are present, I tail. > > I am pretty sure that if you ask us nicely, we'll add an option to > enable headers nonetheless. It's however usually simpler if you pipe > something not to have to use tail/head. Yet another flag to work around inconsistent behaviour is the last thing systemctl needs. Simplicity is not the issue here - you are assuming that output piped to something other than a tty is not destined for human eyes. I shouldn't have to convince you that this is nonsense, and will only get worse if --full is applied automatically to all non-tty output. Shall we add a --no-full flag to work around this, too? > > - Currently, if I run 'systemctl --all' and have no pager (at least no > > pager that systemctl knows of) available, I get an error message and > > no output. This is horribly bad form, and forces me to use > > --no-pager or pipe to cat in order to get output. This issue is > > acknowledged in RH bug 713707. > > We generally do not support if people delete arbitrary things from their > installation. /bin/more is part of util-linux, and if you delete that > then you broke your system, so don't complain to us please. It is difficult to concieve where systemd might end up in future. Is util-linux a systemd dependency? > I am not saying we shouldn't make it possible to run without any pager > installed. But does this matter? No, not at all. It doesn't have > priority in any way. It may not be a priority, but nor should it even be an issue. > > - Another bright idea (RH bug 713567) is that --full should be applied > > to non-tty output automatically, and not to tty output. > > Yes, it actually makes sense and has been requested which is why we > implemented it. This is being implemented now? > > All of these peculiarities stem from poor UNIX programming > > practise. > > I think all of these "peculiarities" stem from actually accepting > progress. Subjective opinion. > > No other Linux/UNIX tools make this assumption (with > > perhaps the exception of git-log et. al.), and if you are wanting > > administrators to feel comfortable with your new soon-to-be-ubiquitous > > tools, then I suggest you try to be consistent with existing > > convention. > > I think you are mixing up "administrators" with "Aaron Sowry". Not really. All other administrators use exactly the same tools I do, very few of which behave like systemctl. Having to deal with command-specific behaviour only makes it more difficult to learn a new tool. /Aaron
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