“grep -R doesn't automatically search amazon”
bugs.launchpad.net
bugs.launchpad.net
>akeane, please stop with the snark.
Why is my bug report a "snark", I have in good faith reported what I consider a bug with Ubuntu, namely the functionality that is being added to the GUI is not also being consistently added to the CLI tools that some many of us rely on.
You have chosen to mark my bug report "invalid", which is your total prerogative and I have total respect for you doing that.
I am saddened, however, you have chosen to resort to personal insults (being labeled a snark nearly made my monocle drop out!), rather than focusing on the technical issues presented.
grep --universe would be a good shortcut, except that i think we all agree this important functionality should be present by default. showing these results from places other than my local computer should be opt-out! how about grep --no-universe ?
You may not agree with the decision by the Ubuntu team to incorporate a feature...and that's fine. There are plenty of ways to voice that opinion (blogs, email, forum).
Putting patently invalid(joke) bug reports in a system that's designed for actionable bug fixes just makes life a bit more troublesome for people actually trying to fix things. Harassing them about it through this channel seems like a waste of their time.
Seems like Shuttleworth responded to this gracefully, though. :)
There are 100's if not 1000's of eyes on this already (and likely 1000's more now that it's being shared on news aggregators).
This to me looked more like a good old fashioned cleverly-constructed reductio ad absurdum argument and Launchpad seems an entirely appropriate forum for such feedback.
Let's consider protest via sit-ins at Local Business Foo for its socially-irresponsible but entirely-legal policy/action of Bar. There are plenty of places to protest those actions/policies. Various municipal bodies (city council, chamber of commerce) and private bodies (better business bureau, etc.) are all channels designed for handling complaint. It is precisely because of these channels exist that more a unconventional method of complaint is more notable and thus potentially more effective. In such cases involving a local business, you are most definitely wasting someone's time, far beyond the bounds of deleting or invalidating a bug tracking ticket.
As a qualification, I recognize that, depending on the topic of protest, there can be a gap/disconnect in the severity of the topic of protest. The cultural go-to for the words "sit-in protest" evokes imagery of the American civil-rights era, whereas this is an affiliate monetization scheme for an open source operating system. Yet there are other topics which have drawn sit-in protests over the decades, and drawing upon these I feel that my metaphor is apt.
(edit: eckyptang beat me to the punch while I was typing this longwinded and nuanced response)
As noted in the comments on the bug, there is a disconnect between the features available at the command-line and available through the GUI; except in the
Second, when you have issues like these[1] popping up, as well as the corresponding privacy concerns, I think it's perfectly fine to illustrate that with a polite bug that illustrates more clearly how silly it is to integrate this feature into an operating system (by default).
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-lens-shoppin...
$> cd ~/Movies/Avengers
... people who changed into this directory were also interested in
Marvel Avengers Assemble [DVD] £10.00
$> ls ~
Desktop Downloads Movies Music Pictures
... related items
Intelliplug - Desktop Version £12.95 $> gcc -o test test.c
test.c:1:22: iostream.h: No such file or directory
... people who encountered this error often purchase
GCC For Professionals [Hardcover] £12.95Then even if it's pre-installed there'd be some reasonable expectation that a program designed to show you shopping selections would have to connect to a 3rd party server and send your query.
With this way, people are forced to see Amazon results and a few of them clicking on irrelevant results and buying will result in a lot more revenue comparatively given that it's certainly an affiliate deal.
Even people that don't know computers would probably prefer to use Windows or OS X, since that's going to be a nicer experience.
The obvious solution that was missed is 2 versions.
You have a paid version with no Amazon integration, and a free version with Amazon enabled by default.
This works 3 ways:
(1) The people who don't want amazon, but don't want to pay can just modify the free version. No big deal, small amount of effort to get ads out of your free software.
(2) Lots of people end up paying for the software, not because they don't want to be bothered modifying the free version, but because they actually want to support the product.
(3) They still get tons of revenue from all of the people that download the free version, but never turn the Amazon off.
Almost nobody complains, and everyone wins.
The solution that they chose is probably the worst possible option, and has put the entire operating system's future at risk.
> grep --universe might be a better shortcut ;)
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-terminal/+bu...
http://www.neatorama.com/2009/12/31/carl-sagans-apple-pie-recipe/Is the joke that grep obviously has nothing to do with searching a server you're not on, and the submitter is pretending to be someone who expected that it would search Amazon for results? If so, that's stupid, and not even a clever joke.
However, from some of the comments, it sounds like real users (ones actually competent enough to be using grep) are expecting this functionality -- perhaps it doesn't work on some Amazon storage site?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2010538/now-in-ubuntu-linux-1...
The fact that it is so patently incorrect to so many outside observers forces me to consider whether the internal vision of the project is completely distorted. No, it's not a big deal, it's just a silly & inappropriate use of your time, and potentially a symptom of a distressing detachment from the real.
These tools are only CLI/GUI equivalents of each other in a very superficial sense.
Dash and grep may have different interfaces, but if their core purpose is "search stuff", it is not wholly unreasonable to expect them to be able to search the same stuff.
[grep is probably the wrong tool. perhaps the output should be included in find instead.]
As I said, they are the same tool only in the most superficial of senses. Is the purpose of this ubuntu thing even to grep input streams or files? Or did the submitter of this 'bug' actually mean to file a bug for slocate, mlocate, or find? Does it do both? These tools have completely different purposes and uses.
How about this for another reason though: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/gre... GNU is bad enough, having Ubuntu tack on whatever shit they feel is "user friendly" would turn the situation into a usability nightmare.
PS. Is this thing seriously called dash? If so, that is terrible. The name 'dash' is already taken... in the FOSS world... by Ubuntu's daddy distro Debian. Hell, Googling "ubuntu dash" returns first results for the proper dash. What the hell were they thinking?
And that is rather the point is it not? If you want to add completion to curl, you don't. Because that is a task for another program. If you want to add amazon searching to grep, you don't. Because that is a task for another program.
Whether and how desirable this is is quite the different question. But it's very technically feasible.
I am saying it should not be done, and cannot be done well.
1. Why on earth wouldn't you want url suggestion/completion for cURL? If there's one place that benefits from a lack of typing it's command-line tools (which is why modern shells all have command and file tab completion).
2. Browsers like 'links' and 'w3m' go so far as to implement mouse support so you can emulate a GUI on the console. Why not for cURL? Just because it has a billion obscure command-line arguments doesn't mean it's a great idea to keep it that way. With a console ncurses UI for cURL I could pick all the options I wanted quickly instead of paging through dozens of man page options, then copying them down with the argument I wanted and re-typing them in line.
I don't think shells should suffer from a lack of innovation just because everyone's obsessed with JavaScript.
What about changing the behavior of grep -r?
(Sorry, I just couldn't resist. When I first clicked the link, I actually thought this was a reference to the GNU grep changes at first).
If you want a CLI equivalent of "ubuntu-dash", then you have to make one. grep is not it.
And as far as I am concerned, anyone who honestly finds themselves wishing cli tools worked like gui tools should knock themselves out. I'm sure plenty of people would find it useful.
There is no elegant way to do this with a CLI interface since it is not a static interface, it is a stream of characters. Anything that's not content will have to be inline with user-generated input and output. It would be like a weather app with ads in the middle of the sun icon.
The analogy is just awesome!! Thanks a ton for bringing a smile on a gloomy day :)
Yes, amazon-enabled dash and grep/find/whatever have different functionality. But that's a recent change. Previously, dash had exactly the same functionality. That's the entire point. You add a feature here, you add the same feature there.
>Or create a new window that temporarily overlays the xterm running the command.
You have got to be kidding me. This is a joke.
>Previously, dash had exactly the same functionality
The exact same functionality of which? And I rather doubt that is true.
>You add a feature here, you add the same feature there.
No. No you do not. Not when there is standardized. And in this case the "here"/"there" relationship has not even been established for "ubuntu-dash"/grep, making this extra idiotic.
Uh, yeah?
Off the top of my head you would need to patch glibc, all the major shells, probably half of coreutils, anything that daemonizes similar to nohup (including screen and tmux, god knows how many CPAN modules), ...
This can be observed by running:
bash -c 'times whoami' > /dev/nullWhere applicable, a command line option can be a great supplement when something that can be achieved via the GUI . For example, encoding a video to a certain codec, having a visual wrapper on this is a nice to have if converting one video or a few videos. However if that same application allows the ability to encode thousands of videos using the CLI option, its an added ability that is appreciated.
quake3cli --map anarki -e '(walk-forward) (rotate 0.2) (fire)'How do I pipe to it?
I doubt many would do it this way, but it would be consistent with the unix design ethos. One program would manage the Playing the Game and perhaps providing an API for interacting with the game, or even a pluggable section of games, and another would handle generating heuristics (or retrieving them).
Then you could, e.g.:
multibot -g quake3 --name "Rocket Llama" -h rockets.lua multibot -g quake3 --name "Ash" -h shotgun-only.lua cat /dev/urandom | multibot -g quake3 --name "Confused"
multibot -g civ3 --name "Dr. No" -h well-defended-island.lua multibot -g civ3 --name "Dr. Evil" -h meeeeelion.lua
That'd be a nightmare to implement, of course. :-)
>Please can you change the grep warez to have this feature, and just install it on my machine while I'm down the pub, after all you do "erm, have root", so it should be easy for you to do :-)
which made the post for me
I still totally buy that ads are step one to Ubuntu integrating more closely with Amazon, and the latter making a pretty bold device play.
For the troubled Ubuntu user who still has a sense of humor and an ounce of common sense, I recommend Linux From Scratch. Time to start over.
They would not have to ask anyone how to remove things or plead with decision-makers to implement their desired changes, they'd just do it themselves.
But yeah, from what I know the Arch Linux distribution imposes a very minimal amount of "pre-configuration".
I've always found it easier to add stuff to a bare bones OS configuration than to remove it from a pre-configured one (you have to thoroughly understand what you're removing first; it's easy to break someone else's delicate Rube Goldberg contraption). But maybe that's just me.
This is exactly why I stopped using RHEL and other distros back in the late 90's. I am very interested in learning - to some extent. Writing my own goddamned drivers for my ADSL modem was not what I had in mind. Canonical and Ubuntu have made huge strides forward for Linux in the marketplace.
The driver issue is, in my opinion, the single biggest problem with not using Windows or Mac. If you just jump right into that issue i.e. that the latest driver for your peripehral is not going to be available for some time and ignore all the other benefits of Linux and other UNIX-like systems, then you could pretty easily conclude these systems are worthless. Hardware manufacturers don't care about them. They only care about Windows and Mac.
But we all know these other systems like Linux are far from worthless.
Clearly, there is some middle ground.
You can still do a heck of a lot without the source code for the 2012 driver for Whiz Bang Hardware Component.
If Canonical and Ubuntu decided not to accept any binary blobs I wonder if the "strides" would seem as huge.
Chromebooks and other low-cost appliances like it are successful in large part because of how easy Ubuntu/Canonical made it to transfer into the Linux world from Windows.
I personally use an Ubuntu 11.x build for everything these days (minus some plain Debian builds on my ARM7 devices), and I really like what they've done for Linux - even if the present stuff they've done has been a little stupid.
When we started using bugzilla for GCC (many years ago now), within the first 100 bug reports, i think there were 5 trolls.
This also isn't very advanced trolling. Advanced trolling is indistinguishable from the thing they were trying to parody.