Not a joke. I knew they used to use a pile of janky shell scripts for their init system. I didn't know they still do. That's disappointing.

And cesarb is correct - the issue isn't scripts; it's shell scripts, especially Bash and similar. Something like Deno/Typescript would be a decent option for example. Nushell is probably acceptable.

Even Python - while a terrible choice - is a better option than shell scripts.

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matheusmoreira 4 days ago | parent [-]

The issue is POSIX standardizing legacy stuff like shells, thereby tempting people to write "portable" software, leading these technologies to ossify and stick with us for half a century and counting. Someone comes along and builds something better but gets threatened for not following "the UNIX way".

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IshKebab 4 days ago | parent [-]

This is a very good point. I wonder how hard it would be to get POSIX to standardise a scripting language that isn't awful.

Probably never going to happen. There is a dearth of good scripting languages, and I would imagine any POSIX committee is like 98% greybeard naysayers who think 70s Unix was the pinnacle of computing.

	▲	valleyer 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		POSIX does not specify the init/rc script system, so it's not a factor here at all. A POSIX-compliant system could use Python scripts. macOS (which is UNIX 03 certified) uses launchd. A POSIX system has to ship the shell, not use it. And FreeBSD isn't actually POSIX-certified anyway! The real consideration here is simply that there are tons of existing rc scripts for BSDs, and switching them all would be a large task.