Re: [dev] Fwd: OT:GUI wireless connections management?

On 30 May 2010, at 17:16, Kris Maglione wrote:

> On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 06:09:02PM +0200, Uriel wrote:
>> On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 5:42 PM, Kris Maglione
>> <maglione.k_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Sun, May 30, 2010 at 11:36:44AM -0400, Kurt H Maier wrote:
>>>> FreeBSD doesn't support UTF-8 in the console. It only does UTF-8
>>>> in X11.
>>>
>>> Well, the point is that it does UTF-8 in libc, which is always the
>>> real
>>> issue.
>>
>> Uh! No, libc has the wchar abomination, which should *never* be used.
>>
>> The issue is having decent tools to work with text that support UTF-8
>> clearly and efficiently, and Plan 9 from User Space provides by far
>> the best solution for this, even on Linux.
>
> You're funny.

The existence and prevalent use of an interface does not necessarily
indicate that interface is a good one. wchar() is made to graft utf8
onto systems which have their roots in the 1970s. Some operating
system research has been done since, not much, but some, and Plan 9 is
the product of some of that research.

Granted, none of that's any help when you just want the tools you're
familiar with, but I've got to the stage where I'll throw away any
software that gets in my way, no matter how 'standard' it is.

To give a bit more props to the research that went into Plan 9 and say
a bit about the poorness of widely-accepted stuff, you see that link
in my signature? For years I used and helped dev a Linux distro with a
package manager written in bash script. I got started to get sorts-
kinda-maybe-ish slightly better than average with bash scripting. I
started to get an idea maybe Plan's shell, rc, was a bit better in a
few ways, so I started working with it. Rc and Plan 9's awk together
were so easy to learn, In a few weeks I'd come up with a whole
fragging web server serving CGI, static files, vhosts... it's a fairly
full-featured piece of kit, and I started with next to no knowlege of
rc and none at all of awk! Working with bourne shell I was just barely
getting to the point where I wasn't struggling to write simple
housekeeping scripts for myself. The difference between properly
designed tools and.. the mountain of shit that makes up standard
software (I'm sorry, I can't use a nicer word) is blowing my mind.

-- 
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it. -- Alan Perlis
rc-httpd: http://eekee.is-a-geek.org/rc-httpd/