[ale] Making the argument for many scripts vs one big one.

[Jim Kinney]

Ah. Now I understand what you're doing. In a prior incarnation, we did the
DoD security dance with a single script that ran just post install
(kickstart called it in %POST) to do the lockdown. The script had comments
for each lockdown and a test was run for each to determine if it was
needed. Post lock tests were done and all pre and post tests were logged to
prove it was done. As this was done before a human touched the machine, the
powers that be were happy.

So, zillion scriptlets can be merged into monolithic script and PHBs are
happy.


On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 2:11 PM, leam hall <leamhall at gmail.com> wrote:

> In this case it's less than a couple hundred Bash scripts. Each script
> deals with a specific task in DoD directives. Thus I can pull the ones our
> site needs and document why the others won't work.
>
> Or I can bang my head into my desk why duplicating what's already been
> done...
>
> Leam
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 2:01 PM, Michael B. Trausch <mbt at naunetcorp.com>wrote:
>
>>  On 07/24/2013 01:50 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
>>
>> That would depend, to me at least, on whether the final deployment is an
>> internal or external tool. Internal gets the single blob. External gets a
>> zillion files. The logic is to make it confusing to the external (l)user so
>> they won't tinker with things. Bonus points if the zillion files all look
>> like obfuscated perl :-)
>>
>>
>> Hrm... we need a minification tool for Bash.
>>
>> Perl, obviously, doesn't need one.  Just remove the whitespace, it's ugly
>> and cryptic all by itself.  :-D
>>
>>
>> I saw a system once that had a shell application that called a zillion
>> files. The customer wanted the development team to go away but was worried
>> about what all the application did. So I went over it with a fine tooth
>> comb. Basically, the application consisted of 4 or 5 main script files that
>> each would call 20-30 of the crap files to do things like count lines and
>> characters but then dump the results without ever using them. So there was
>> 150-200 scripts that were culled from the process after some careful
>> refactoring in the 5 main ones. Then I ran into funny issues that were sort
>> of like race conditions but not quite. The zillion crap scripts were
>> created to slow down the main scripts so it was closer to the original
>> system that ran at 300MHz instead of the now 1.5 GHz. It was using many
>> serial ports to get data from lab systems. I replaced the lot with a few
>> sleep calls to allow the serial port data to accumulate and the developers
>> were dumped.
>>
>>
>> Nice.  :-)
>>
>> A tool like Closure would actually be really neat for things like bash,
>> python, perl, etc.
>>
>> Well, not Python, since Python actually relies on whitespace for
>> semantics.
>>
>> Of course, if you have a gazillion things that can cause deadlocks or
>> have race conditions, you absolutely want things in a single program, even
>> if the work is itself spread over different modules.  Sounds like the
>> perfect thing for C.
>>
>>
>>     — Mike
>>
>>
>> --
>>   [image: Naunet Corporation Logo]  Michael B. Trausch
>>
>> President, *Naunet Corporation*
>> ☎ (678) 287-0693 x130 or (888) 494-5810 x130
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Ale mailing list
>> Ale at ale.org
>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Mind on a Mission <http://leamhall.blogspot.com/>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>


-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
*
*Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain
at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail.
It won't fatten the dog.
- Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
*
http://electjimkinney.org
http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20130724/868f1d21/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: dafjajhe.png
Type: image/png
Size: 1701 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20130724/868f1d21/attachment-0001.png>