alt Hacker NewsYeah, that's pretty appalling.
Regardless of how good the philosophy of something is, if it's as niche and manpower constrained as OpenBSD is then it's going to accumulate problems like this.
Yeah, that's pretty appalling.
Regardless of how good the philosophy of something is, if it's as niche and manpower constrained as OpenBSD is then it's going to accumulate problems like this.
I actually think this isn't even surprising from OpenBSD philosophically. They still subscribe to the Unix philosophy of old, moreso than FreeBSD and much much more than Linux.
That is, "worse is better" and it's okay to accept a somewhat leaky abstraction or less helpful diagnostics if it simplifies the implementation.
This is why `ed` doesn't bother to say anything but "?" to erroneous commands. If the user messes up, why should it be the job of the OS to handhold them? Garbage in, garbage out. That attitude may seem out of place today but consider that it came from a time when a program might have one author and 1-20 users, so their time was valued almost equally.