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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • The issue is not only complexity, though it does play a role. You can also run into issues with pure text parsing, especially when whitespace is involved. The IP thing is a very classic example in my opinion, and while whitespace might not be an issue there (more common with filenames), the queries you find online in my opinion aren’t less complex.

    Normal CLI output is often meant to be consumed by humans, so the data presentation requirements are different. Then you find out that an assumption you made isn’t true (e.g. due to LANG indicating a non-English language) and suddenly your matching rules don’t fit.

    There are just a lot of pitfalls that can make things go subtly wrong, which is why parsing general CLI output that’s not intended to be parsed is often advised against. It doesn’t mean that it will go wrong.

    Regarding Python, I think it has a place when you do what I’d call data set processing, while what I talk about is shell plumbing. They can both use JSON, but the tools are probably not the same.







  • For me, the factors were:

    • the ability to split your system configuration into logical modules. Describe one logical thing in one file, no matter how many other factors are involved. Don’t want that thing anymore? Just don’t reference the module, and all changes will be reverted.
    • easily try out new configurations and roll back, regardless of underlying filesystem, without performance penalties.
    • the ability to put logic into your configuration (technically, there’s no difference between what’s typically referred to as configuration and a module in nix, though the latter usually has more “logic” and provides values with lower priority).
    • as a consequence, make modules transferable between systems. There’s e.g. a Lanzaboote module that enables Secure Boot in a really smart way on NixOS, and the configuration is in my opinion easier than on any other Linux system.
    • the reproducibility, from which the “easy reinstallation” follows












  • I only had Windows 8 on a notebook that I bought and wanted to give it a try again, however I switched the machine over once I learned that it couldn’t be updated to 8.1 through normal updates, but that you had to use the store, because they were really trying to push the store. Also my NAS used NFS back then, which my home edition of Windows didn’t support, I think you need professional.

    These two things pushed me to migrate the notebook as well