Norton Utilities vs. "the way things are"

[uunet!bria!mike]

In an article, ide.com!hartman (Robert Hartman) writes:
>In article <433 at bria> uunet!bria!mike writes:
>An end user sometimes needs to retrieve a deleted or clobbered file.
>This is a perfectly reasonable requirement that UNIX has always
>ignored.  Sine UNIX won't do it, it leaves the door open for NU, who
>will.  No one's forcing you to buy it.

My flame was not attacking the _concept_ of undeletion.  My objection to NU
was the way that it was done (hooking onto the operating system, and munging
with calls like statfs() so that they lie about the _true_ state of things).
It's nothing but a kludge.  The ability to undelete files should be a
capability of the kernel and underlying filesystem, not some external hack.

>>People who are interested in being secrataries or accountants are not
>>going to waste their time writing useless shell scripts that beep, or
>>draw boxes, or whatever.
>
>Well, here you seem to want it both ways.  The best assumption
>underlying the design of UNIX is that you can't know beforehand what a
>user will want to do.  Since the user base is broadening, you can no
>longer limit this to what a computer professional might want to do.  We
>must include amateur users in our thinking.  So if an amateur user
>wants to cook shell scripts that beep, it would be a good idea to
>provide him/her with a straightforward way to do that in the shell.

No, I don't want it both ways.  I strongly believe in power to the user.
However, I do NOT beleive that NU provides anything in the way of script
gizmos that aren't already available for _free_.  This is why I ridiculed
it. 

Oh, and you seem to be lumping "computer professional" in with "amateur user".
Again, it is _unlikely_ that an amateur user is going to whip out shell
scripts.  It is very likely that the computer professional will.  Therefore,
tools should be geared towards the computer professional.  With these tools,
the computer professional can make life easier for the amateur user, rather
than requiring that the amateur user become a computer professional himself.

As a computer professional, NU does nothing to advance my art.  If anything,
it seeks to further isolate me from the object of my passion.

>>If you're an accountant, then do accounting, not programming.
>
>You're right.  I'll do the accounting or whatever, and if something
>about UNIX gets in my way, I'll go buy someone else's package to get it
>out of my way.  Your disdain for my computing problems means that I
>won't buy the package from you, since you obviously don't understand my
>needs or care about them.

If you are an accountant (and many of the poeple that I work with are), then
your needs _are_ important to me.  My job is to make sure that if something
gets in your way, I remove it.  _I_ am the admin, _you_ are the end user.
I will administer, you will use.  'Nuff said.

>Retrieving a clobbered file is not, by definition, a job for a
>sysadmin.  There's nothing privileged about it.  And people want to do
>it all the time.  From the end-user's standpoint, the fact that I can't
>do it myslef is simply a flaw in the implementation.  You may have grown
>accustomed to it, and even grown to love it.  However, after working
>with UNIX for over 10 years, I still see it as a flaw, even though it
>hasn't bitten me in a very long time.  So, if someone comes along with
>a fix, I say good for them!

I agree with this completely.  There should be the ability for a user
to recover deleted files.  My point is that it should be a function of
the kernel, and not an external kludge. 

Should I compare methodology, I would much prefer a tool that goes hunting
through the freelist and recovering only part of my file, rather than
Pete Norton sticking his fingers in my kernel.
-- 
Michael Stefanik, MGI Inc., Los Angeles| Opinions stated are not even my own.
Title of the week: Systems Engineer    | UUCP: ...!uunet!bria!mike
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Remember folks: If you can't flame MS-DOS, then what _can_ you flame?