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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Are there any things in Linux that need to be started over from scratch? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I'm afraid that at some point, we'll realize there are issues with the software we're using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite.

Are there any instances of this happening? Where something is designed with a flaw that doesn't get realized until much later, necessitating scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch?

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[–] taladar 0 points 8 months ago (2 children)

During development is just about the only time when that doesn't matter because you have direct access to the source code to figure out which function failed exactly. As a sysadmin I don't have the luxury of reproducing every issue with a debug build with some debugger running and/or print statements added to figure out where exactly that value originally came from. I really need to know why it failed the first time around.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, so it sounds like your complaint is actually with application not propagating relevant error handling information to where it's most convenient for you to read it. Linux is not at fault in your example, because as you said, it returns all the information needed to fix the issue to the one who developed the code, and then they just dropped the ball.

Maybe there's a flag you can set to dump those kinds of errors to a log? But even then, some apps use the fail case as part of normal operation (try to open a file, if we can't, do this other thing). You wouldn't actually want to know about every single failure, just the ones that the application considers fatal.

As long as you're running on a turing complete machine, it's on the app itself to sufficiently document what qualifies as an error and why it happened.

[–] taladar 1 points 8 months ago

The whole point of my complaint is that shitty C conventions produce shitty error messages. If I could rely on the programmer to work around those stupid conventions every time by actually checking the error and then enriching it with all relevant information I would have no complaints.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

As sysadmin you should know about strace

[–] taladar 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I know about strace, strace still requires me to reproduce the issue and then to look at backtraces if nobody bothered to include any detail in the error.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

Somehow (lack of) backtrace and details in error is "C based assumption"