[CentOS] Dogs, trolls, and neighborly free/open source

[Warren Young]

On 8/5/2010 11:51 AM, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> When someone says, "I'm writing a shell script, and hereabouts I need
>> $TOOL to do such and such," a good answer is usually forthcoming.
>>
>> When someone says, "Tell me how to script this $PROJECT," the
>> commmunity usually points the OP off to Google/Manual.
>
> I don't think it is the nature of the requests that are different

I would guess that most sysadmin type scripts are under 100 LOC.  I 
can't decide if the rare few KSLOC scripts push the median out to the 
low hundreds, or if the great number of short scripts drag that median 
down into the double digits.

I think a similar bell curve exists for programs/systems complex enough 
to require "coders" -- professional software developers -- but that the 
scale is magnified by at least 10, maybe 100.  If I had to pick a value, 
I'd say the median software project has 10,000 SLOC.  The range extends 
from "glorified shell script" up into the millions of lines.

The point is, a 20 line answer in each case is qualitatively different 
because it represents a different proportion of the task.

> administrators pretend that everything they do is unique and not
> reusable - or they don't want it to be.

It's my experience that most short sysadmin type scripts on POSIXy 
systems are site-specific glue code.  The generic parts are off in 
external programs or libraries that the scripts call.

So, us coders are happy to maintain tar(1) and grep(1) and dialog(1) and 
whatnot for you sysadmin types, but we're not likely to write a one-off 
script that ties all these together to make a custom home directory 
backup system for you.