Re: Please default to 'commit -a' when no changes were added

On Fri, Apr 23, 2010 at 17:25, Eric Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> wrote:

The UNIX philosophy: "Provide mechanism, not policy."

Some goofball touched upon this subject in a little-read book called "The Art of Unix Programming", specifically:

    What Unix Gets Wrong
    http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s04.html

    ...

    But the cost of the mechanism-not-policy
    approach is that when the user can set policy,
    the user must set policy. Nontechnical end-users
    frequently find Unix's profusion of options and
    interface styles overwhelming and retreat to
    systems that at least pretend to offer them
    simplicity.

    In the short term, Unix's laissez-faire approach
    may lose it a good many nontechnical users. In
    the long term, however, it may turn out that this
    ‘mistake’ confers a critical advantage — because
    policy tends to have a short lifetime, mechanism
    a long one. Today's fashion in interface look-and-feel
    too often becomes tomorrow's evolutionary dead
    end (as people using obsolete X toolkits will tell
    you with some feeling!). So the flip side of the flip
    side is that the “mechanism, not policy” philosophy
    may enable Unix to renew its relevance long after
    competitors more tied to one set of policy or
    interface choices have faded from view.[6]

:-D

Sincerely, Michael Witten