file attributes

[Marcus J. Ranum]

erik at srava.sra.co.jp (Erik M. van der Poel) writes:
>> Haven't you seen SCO's Open Desktop?  It does just this, but without
>> (I hope) any gruesome kernel hacks.
>
>But does SCO's product allow you to click on the icon that represents
>the 1/4 inch cartridge tape drive, to automatically select tar or cpio
>(or whatever) for reading the tape?

	You're joking, I assume! How dare you even assume I *WANT* to
read the tape? That's the problem with all this GUI GLOP - it makes a
lot of really stupid assumptions. First off, any user who knows enough
about UNIX to understand what tar/cpio/dd/grep/whatever is, is probably
not going to waste time with a GUI anyhow. You throw away too much of
the nice abilities UNIX has - how do you do a pipe with a point and
click user interface? (and are you patient enough to do whatever mouse
contortions would be necessary to set the pipe up, when you can just
type it?) What about multiple files passed to something as a parameter?

	Suppose I have 16 C source files I want to shove into cc. 
It is *NOT* sufficient to set their default execution to be "cc file"
because I may want to pass compiler flags. So I have to edit the
damn attributes and then, joy and bliss, I can *click* and they
compile. Where does my error text go? (yes, I sometimes make errors)
Do I then have to completely reset the attributes when I want to
pump them through lint? No thanks. I'll just have to keep crawling
along typing "make", "make clean", or "make lint" instead.

	FYI, I don't use tar *or* cpio every time I want to do something
to a tape. Sometimes I use cat, grep, zcat, and so forth. For a GUI to
be half useful, it'd have to know which I wanted when - let me guess,
the data on the tape should have meta-data at the tape header, too,
right?

	ioctl(tapefd,TIOCWTFAREYOU,&buf);

	I second Chris Siebenmann's suggestion that people read Pike's
paper on "help" in the latest USENIX. It, in a nutshell, has the grace
to assume you know what you're doing, yet tries to facilitate your
work by keeping as much quickly re-usable information about your working
context around - information which can be quickly used to cut and
paste commands and basically save you typing.

mjr.

PS - As an aside, I realized years ago that GUIs were an utterly stupid idea
the day when I completed a complex click-drag-drop operation and it asked me
"are you sure?" as if I had *ACCIDENTALLY* grunted and sweated to manipulate
the silly mouse to drop the icon into the bloody flaming trashcan!!!!!