[H-GEN] Hella Lua!

[Greg Black]

On 2006-03-28, Russell Stuart wrote:

> After 10 years (dating back to RedHat 5.2) and countless 
> corrupted backups, I see this entry in cpio's change log:

I'm not having a go at Russell here, but this seems like an
invitation to make a comment:

    If you see your tools making a mess of your data (and if
    your data is of any consequence to you), then it's time to
    either arrange to get the tool fixed or to move to another
    tool without the breakage.  From where I'm standing, any
    case of "countless corrupted backups" is a clear indicator
    that something needs to change.

FWIW, I stopped using cpio on any platform in the late 1980s.
It has always been a fragile tool and better alternatives have
been available for ages.  (On some platforms, of course, cpio is
just an alternate name for the better alternatives which know to
honour cpio options when invoked as cpio rather than as pax or
tar.)

And, even though I'm not having a go at Russell, I must say that
it took me two tries to parse the Subject header:

> Subject: [H-GEN] Hella Lua!

At first, I was expecting to hear that Russell had become
excited about the programming language Lua and had just typo'd
the "Hello" part.  Then I realised that I was looking at yet
another variant of the word commonly spelled "Halleluiah" or
"Hallelujah" or even "Alleluia".

Cheers, Greg