[H-GEN] Simple Linux editors

[Robert Kearey]

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Greg Black wrote:

[I've snipped out a lot of things I have no real arguemt with]

> | Gods, if I ever saw a consultant doing that, I'd be *demanding*, in no 
> | uncertain terms, to know what the hell he or she is doing.

> | I'm sure that's not quite what you mean, though.

> No, it's not even close to what I meant. 

I didn't think so!

Having had to clean up after certain "consultants", who have been called 
in by panicky management, I have perhaps an excessively jaundiced view 
of these things.

> I was talking about a
> case where some organisation has been doing whatever they do for
> many years and have discovered one dark night that they have
> shot themselves in the foot.  At this point, fearing a total
> disaster, they call for outside help.  When the help arrives,
> they explain as far as they can what's wrong and state their
> expectations and they invite the help to do whatever s/he can to
> solve the problem.

I'm resisting a Pulp Fiction pop-culture reference here. It isn't easy.

Yes, I've been in that situation.
[interesting example snipped]

> | if all you've 
> | got left is ed then something is /extremely wrong/ and it's time to 
> | rethink your strategy.

> I've never suggested that you should do nothing until disaster
> strikes and then expect ed to save the world.  I've simply been
> talking about the use of a tool for editing files that will
> almost certainly be available in the darkest moment if it so
> happens that you are asked to come to the rescue.

I didn't intend to suggest otherwise.

> | Greg, cut it out with the snippy intellectual hairshirtness, please.

> Sorry, I didn't mean to be offensive.  I did write some of that
> stuff at the end of a very long day that was notable for the
> number of people who were angry with me because of problems they
> had caused.  Perhaps some of my mood leaked into this exchange.

That's fine - I've got my hug.

> | What, it'll reconfigure your buggy router? It'll save you from a 
> | corrupted kernel image, or intermittently dodgy RAM? Or any of the 
> | umpty-thousand non-trivial foobars that can occur with a modern complex 
> | server?

> I don't think I claimed any of these things for ed.  Please
> stick to the facts here.  I've said that ed is an editor, and
> that it's useful in that role.

No, you didn't make such a claim. I was merely intending to demonstrate 
that merely knowing (or not knowing) basic ed biology does not a good 
(or bad) sysadmin make.

> | Not many people are placed in situations where they need to bootstrap a 
> | minimal unix off a tape via a dot-matrix teletype these days. That's 
> | just how it is.

> True, but not really relevant.  I have not said that everybody
> must learn to be proficient with ed.

That's the impression I had of your input so far - I'll re-examine your 
past postings though.

> Sometimes, and in some
> quite surprising situations, being able to deal with disasters
> that should not have happened is useful -- perhaps you recall
> the recent thread about recovering data from a dead disk that
> clearly should have been backed up?

Oh, yes indeedy ...

[Greg en-clues people]

> | I rather think that you and I work in very different worlds, Greg.

> I don't know your work world, but I have been describing real
> events from mine.

To illustrate, I should explain that I work for Red Hat APAC. Red Hat is 
an extremely inter-cooperative [1] company - at any given time, there'll 
be someone online, or available by phone, semaphore or carrier pigeon 
who will have at least the start of the Trail of Clues I need to get 
something fixed. Happily, I'm in the position of being part of a company 
where most of our hardware and software infrastructure is relatively 
new, and I just don't encounter the problems you see. Whether that's 
good or bad for all mankind, or just sysadmintrihood [1], remains to be seen

> | Whilst I don't agree with your position that not knowing inscrutable ed 
> | off by heart is an offense unto good order and makes one a Bad and 
> | Incompetent Sysadmin, I do see the value of having such skills. I'll 
> | certainly brush up on them myself.

> Well, I consider that a good outcome from this.  And, to be
> clear about this, I don't despise people who can't drive ed
> without the man page in front of them -- but I do think knowing
> ed is a useful skill for sys admins and programmers.  I don't
> ever recommend it for other people.

Hooray! Closure!

> Greg

-- 
Rob K - Ich mag Chips mit brauner Soße
http://members.optushome.com.au/mammal
Please abbreviate 'bandwidth' as 'bndwth'
thereby conserving precious bndwth.


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