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Date:      Thu, 5 Jul 2012 09:22:25 +0200
From:      Jonathan McKeown <j.mckeown@ru.ac.za>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Pull in upstream before 9.1 code freeze?
Message-ID:  <201207050922.25815.j.mckeown@ru.ac.za>
In-Reply-To: <62039A45-92E4-4588-988D-6DF39D7B01E5@bsdimp.com>
References:  <CA%2BQLa9B-Dm-=hQCrbEgyfO4sKZ5aG72_PEFF9nLhyoy4GRCGrA@mail.gmail.com> <4FF4BEED.10103@FreeBSD.org> <62039A45-92E4-4588-988D-6DF39D7B01E5@bsdimp.com>

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On Thursday 05 July 2012 08:10:17 Warner Losh wrote:
> On Jul 4, 2012, at 4:08 PM, Doug Barton wrote:
> >
> > First, I agree that being able to turn it off should be possible. But I
> > can't help being curious ... why would you *not* want a feature that
> > tells you what to install if you type a command that doesn't exist on
> > the system?
>
> Because I find on Linux it often gets it wrong and winds up being useless
> noise.  Mostly, though, it is because I mistype commands more than I type
> commands that should be there, but aren't.

Why on earth /would/ I want a command-line Clippy? (``I see you typed gerp. 
Would you like me to help you find a package with a gerp command?'').

It was bloody irritating in Microsoft Office and it would be bloody irritating 
on the command line.

Besides, as Warner points out, I'm many times more likely to get my fingers in 
a twist than randomly type in a command to see if it does anything.

As for the idea that Linux refugees need extra help to migrate, that's the 
sort of thinking that led to things like:

alias dir=ls

for MSDOS refugees. It might be a useful crutch for a while but eventually you 
need to learn the system you're using rather than try to make it more like 
the one you got rid of.

Or perhaps I'm just a grumpy old man....

More seriously, maybe we should have something like 
<http://bhami.com/rosetta.html>; in the Handbook.

And before someone says patches welcome, I think it needs to be someone who 
knows Linux rather better than I do.

Jonathan



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