bug#22698: ls output changes considered unacceptable

[Jason A. Donenfeld]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 11:02 PM, Jim Meyering <address@hidden> wrote:
> Thanks for the summary.
> However, bear in mind that many many people objected
> to systemd, too, to the point of sending death threats to
> its author. Many more people recognized that systemd is
> great, yet did not send email -- and all major distros
> have converted.

This is a laughable, and even a despicable, argument to make.

For starters, most people, whether they like systemd or dislike
systemd, agree that many developers were over-agressive in promoting
it. But that's beside the point.

Importantly, you haven't just innovated massively and introduced an
entirely new init system building on years of research and work,
discussions with communities, large studies of the problem, thousands
of man hours of development... Again, whether or not you care for
systemd, it is obviously a project that is written in more than one
line of code.

In this case, we are talking about reverting a single line of code
that changes the defaults.

That's right - a single line of code.

Changing the visual (tty-only) output of a command, for which
aesthetics are quite important, is not innovation, is not radical, is
not interesting. It's just an annoyance, and an unwanted one at that.

Look - you tried to change some critical visual representation, nobody
likes it, so the experiment failed, and now it's time to put it back
how it was before, and move on. Dragging this onward is a waste of
time for everybody.