Is it fair to say "ls" is dead? No commits in 15 years | Hacker News Reader

Is it fair to say "ls" is dead? No commits in 15 years

twitter.com

38 pointslopkeny12ko48 comments

Is it fair to say "ls" is dead? No commits in 15 years

Not at all. Commits are for changes and fixes. If something is working, don't fix it no matter how tempting it may be. Millions of people use "ls" hourly. If it was broken we would be hearing about it.

This a parody. It's a comment on the expectation of code to be constantly updated.

Has it been rewritten in Electron? It doesn’t use enough RAM so I don’t if ls is actually doing anything.

/one_joke

It needs a new UI, so it can be "fresh" and "modern" looking. And notifications.

`ls` has definitely had changes and fixes in the last 15 years.

The quoting fix I definitely remember. I vaguely recall maybe some sort/time thing? No doubt there is more I don't remember.

Which `ls`?

It’s extremely dead! Its header file hasn’t been touched in 30 years. SMH my head that anyone would believe that a project that doesn’t get nightly updates would NOT be instantly declared dead.

I'm assuming this is a subtle critique of those who declare projects without frequent commits "dead".

It's a fairly lame troll though, as 'ls' would indeed be unmaintained and probably broken if it hadn't had commits in 15 years.

This got me wondering so I went and looked and it seems like lo and behold there was actually a commit to the GNU ls source just 2 weeks ago.

https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/ls.c

"maint: prefer char32_t to wchar_t"

Looking through, the GNU coreutils still get a lot of maintenance tweaks.

I am rewriting it in Rust with AI integration.

Can you pleeease also enable SaaS subscription pricing, and a discord bot so I could easily query my files and folders through a chat interface?

No monthly seating though I want pay per command and only on successful exit code. Volume discounts are a plus as well please have your enterprise account exec get ahold of my head of it sec to start the 9 month long audit and vetting process while sales haggles back and forth with my vp of Eng on pricing and sla.

don't forget that we need to make `ls` PCI- and HIPAA-compliant so it can pass our arch review boards. this is a dealbreaker, so we're going to need your presales engineer to draft some architecture documents to help us sell `ls` internally.

it would also be great if `ls` worked in our airgap that we haven't built yet, but we fully intend to. this is also a dealbreaker.

Isn’t “files” a bit outdated? We could have it work with buckets and objects instead.

It's 2023. If you're not querying blocks on a distributed ledger you're living in the past.

This was supposed to be lighthearted fun. You crossed a line.

Make it also work on blockchains.

Each time you type the command it should quietly use your local compute to generate an nft to sell

This is definitely a parody. I assume, in response to the open office discussions from a few weeks ago.

If it were written in nodejs, perhaps. Code rots at different rates in different languages.

Code in fresh languages tends to rot fast, but old UNIX software is preserved with C salt ;)

One of the best, unexpected, wordplay jokes I've seen on hackernews. Bravo.

I do not think node was a thing 15 years ago

Just shy by 1 year - NodeJS was written 14 years ago in 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node.js#History

Huh strange. I've never heard of this person and I'm blocked.

Sorry! https://twitter.com/jdan/status/1669144699595022338?s=46&t=P...

Can’t see that either :D

I’ll often scroll through replies and preemptively block accounts that demonstrate behavior I don’t want in my social media experience. I imagine others must do the same with accounts that have liked certain posts.

Sounds a bit fruitless unless you read from a small circle of accounts. How much time do you spend on that, and how often would you say you’re rewarded by seeing a pre-blocked post outside of your blocking time?

Single-user Mastodon instance following approximately 100 accounts with third-party replies via FediFetcher, estimated cost of blocking 10 seconds per day, benefit unmeasured.

Ah, Mastodon would be manageable. I thought you were on Twitter doing this.

gotta make sure that echo chamber only gets echoes, eh?

> behavior

Personally I aim to filter out trolling, derision, shallow joking and repetition games, and uncharitable interpretation.

> I aim to filter out trolling, derision, meaningless joking, repetition games, and uncharitable interpretation.

Your dedication to blocking every account you come across is admirable, at least.

Likely because you’re an “X Premium” user.

put another way: `ls` is perfect

Parody account

> Is it fair to say "ls" is dead? No commits in 15 years

Wait till freedesktop or Gnome people find about it. /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com