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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2023

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  • understand what is the common idea about the fact that systemd could be a critical part of Linux which is in the hands of IBM and Microsoft and what this means for the linux community overall.

    Either nobody cares, or it’s too much complottistic to be real.

    I wasn’t familiar with the word complotism but yes I think this is the case - It’s just an unsubstantiated conspiracy.

    Even if were true that Microsoft had taken over systemd by stealth. What is the harm? If they suddenly do something malicious with it then all the distros will just fork systemd and continue without the malicious elements.






  • So, you don’t know Python at all AND you don’t know Bash, but you feel compelled to talk about how one is so much better than the other?

    I have plenty of experience with Bash, hence why I was eager to question the implication that bash was less complicated than other solutions.

    You’re correct that I don’t know python, but I do have plenty of familiarity with PHP, JS, C#, and Rust. From my experience with those languages I guessed that python probably has similar libraries for making API calls.

    Thanks for providing the actual examples. Looking at them I’m curious if you still think I’m wrong?

    In my opinion the bash is much more difficult to understand than the python and therefore it’s more likely for bugs to creep in. For example I think curl_exit_code=$? should be called immediately after the curl command as the way it’s presently written isn’t it capturing the exit code of the tail command?

    You’ve explicitly called --connect-timeout and --max-time. imo it only comes from experience that you need to add these options. I had a script that had been funcitoning without issue for months then suddenly started to hang and it was a while before I figured out that the defaults for curl had no timeout so it didn’t gracefully fail like I would expect.

    These are the kind of traps that I fall into all the time with bash and it’s painful to debug.

    response=$(
      curl \
        --silent \
        --write-out "\n%{http_code}" \
        --connect-timeout "$CONNECT_TIMEOUT" \
        --max-time "$MAX_TIME" \
        "$API_URL"
    )
    
    http_body=$(echo "$response" | sed '$d')        
    http_code=$(echo "$response" | tail -n1)
    
    curl_exit_code=$?
    


  • That’s profoundly untrue. Scripting in bash is an indescribably painful experience.

    You have absolutely no idea what version of a binary the user will be running so you’re limited to using only options that have been well established.

    I’ve never worked with python but I understand it has at least got some semblance of package management providing assurance that methods you’re calling exist, and I imagine it has some standardised mechanism for handling errors unlike bash.

    A simple example is making a GET request to an API and deserializing a JSON response if its successful, handling a timeout if the server can’t be reached or handling the HTTP status code if it’s not a 200 response.

    JS, python, Rust, C#, Java etc will all handle that simple scenario with zero effort but in bash it’s a nightmare.