I Implemented /dev/printerfact in Rust

https://christine.website/blog/dev-printerfact-2021-04-17

by todsacerdoti • 5 years ago

164 88 5 years ago

O_H_E2• 5 years ago

I know I am being pedantic, but it is a bit weird to editorialize "How I Implemented /dev/printerfact in Rust" to "I Implemented...", make the author come off a little more boastful than they intended to.

a_t482• 5 years ago

"I reimplemented" might be better

xena8• 5 years ago

Author of the article here, I think "I Implemented" is the least wrong way to phrase it. I didn't reimplement it because it didn't exist before I implemented it.

pcr910303• 5 years ago

HN strips out prefix ‘How’s by default. I guess that was applied here as well...

O_H_E2• 5 years ago

Ummm...I dont think so

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...

iudqnolq4• 5 years ago

The author implemented /dev/printerfact. Someone else came up with printerfact. If someone said they implemented /dev/null I wouldn't think they came up with the concept of null.

Also printerfact was implemented by a high person with sed and a list of cat facts. While excellent, it's not an incredible achievement we need to defend the integrity of.

whateveracct• 5 years ago

this is one of my favorite Nix blogs out there! the NixOS systemd timer one was great - I used it when I had to make my first timer and it was the best resource out there.

The narrative style made it a fun read too. Feels like someone explaining things to me personally off the cuff.

xena8• 5 years ago

Author of the post here. That's the style I try to go for, that balance of serious, shitpost and interesting side notes you'd get from DMing a particularly sarcastic coworker that means well on Slack. The Mara interludes add into this because it allows some blending in of the Socratic method to make some more complicated things something closer to a dialogue. I have plans to take this further though. If you have any suggestions on how I should skew these plans please let me know.

iudqnolq4• 5 years ago

Is Mara meant to be Mara Bos of Rust twitter shitposting fame? It almost fits.

xwx• 5 years ago

Printers have been domestiprintered for half as long as scanners have been.

malf• 5 years ago

Printer facts were originally made by a very stoned person that had access to the Cat Facts API and sed. As such instances like indiprintere are features.

gerdesj• 5 years ago

https://printerfacts.cetacean.club/ Follow the various links. See if you can jump to the same conclusion as me regarding who forgot to anchor their regexes when playing with Cat Facts 8)

xena8• 5 years ago

It's a feature.

selfmodruntime• 5 years ago

I enjoy christines style of writing very much. I can only recommend it to anyone out there interested in dev ops, rust or nix. Her narrative style and different characters may be a bit jarring at first, but I got used to it pretty fast.

ecf2• 5 years ago

On the other hand, I found this style of writing detestable.

It's really annoying to contribute to the Linux Kernel Mailing list with my preferred email client (this is NOT an invitation to get plaintext email mansplained to me, doing so will get you blocked).

Get over it. The maintainers of the project have to keep in mind tens of thousands of contributors from all walks of life and I wouldn’t miss a single thing by being blocked by this author.

wildmanx• 5 years ago

It took me a sadly too-long time to realize that this had nothing to do with any printer API.

Like, I read the whole post, and all the comments here on HN. And only _then_ did it dawn on me.

xena8• 5 years ago

Author of the post here, I love those kinds of slow burns. I'm really glad you managed to experience one.

amluto3• 5 years ago

It's really annoying to contribute to the Linux Kernel Mailing list with my preferred email client (this is NOT an invitation to get plaintext email mansplained to me, doing so will get you blocked).

Heh. I really wish the kernel list would detect that a post has valid text and html content and just throw away the html rather than rejecting the whole thing. Plain text is, sadly, not a first class feature of most non-terminal email clients these days.

readingnews• 5 years ago

I really wish the kernel list would detect that a post has valid text and html content and just throw away the html

Because. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

Honestly, I am not trying to put on my old-man hat, but I despise anything other than plain text in email. I agree with the KML. Email should not have binaries, html, tags, etc... of course, M$ and others will happily render them, so why not, right?

iudqnolq4• 5 years ago

Email can have multiple parallel payloads in different formats (see MIME). It's part of the spec, not a hack.

The OP is suggesting that if LKML gets multiple payloads where it can understand one of them it just selects the one it can understand. This is what other text-only clients do.

They're not suggesting parsing html into text (tangentially, if they were, there are much better approaches than the one you linked. One of the most commonly used ones is originally by Aaron Schwartz https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text )

kelnos3• 5 years ago

Email should not have binaries, html, tags, etc.

That's like saying postal mail should only allow you to send letters typed on a typewriter.

This "email should be plaintext only" idea was reasonable when bandwidth was limited and metered and expensive. While that's still the case in some parts of the world, most of us here are not in that situation. If you, personally, want to reject emails that have attachments or are not plaintext, you're free to do so, of course, but don't suggest that the rest of us are doing it wrong.

nolok• 5 years ago

this is NOT an invitation to get plaintext email mansplained to me

That person can reassure herself, there are just as many women know-it-all-better-than-you as there are men, arrogance and condescension are sadly not strictly male traits.

It tends to more often be guys in the tech world, sure, but then it's just https://xkcd.com/1138/

elygre• 5 years ago

This reads like "I was not allowed to mansplain email, but at least I can mansplain mansplaining".

ASalazarMX• 5 years ago

Would any woman kindly explain how you configure your email client to automatically send plain text emails to designated addresses? It seems sex is a filter here.

globular-toast3• 5 years ago

Odd to see this casual sexism thrown in at the end of a technical article. Imagine if I just randomly threw in how long women take to get ready or something at the end of a technical article. It would be completely bizarre and my sanity would probably be called into question.

coolreader182• 5 years ago

Almost like this is something she's experienced before, and this is a preemptive attempt to stop it from happening.

Edit: for example, hn/item?id=26847629. "oh you probably have no idea how to do this, right? let me walk you through it"

numpad0• 5 years ago

Fuck furries. Block them on social media, preemptively if you can. You won’t miss much from walking away.

This my comment needs to be downvoted but because it must be said and this will be downvoted anyway I have no problem making their life silently harder. That is the way they are playing this game.

aidenn0• 5 years ago

Every single gui email client I tried out a few months ago let me send plain text email. Some would not send HTML email though.

I suspect the author of TFA is using a webmail client, but as they did not state which client they are using, I cannot be sure.

gray_-_wolf• 5 years ago

Both gmail and outlook (web version) can be configured to send text/plain, I have it set in such a way.

ben0x539• 5 years ago

Surely in the preceding decades someone has written an explicit LKML client, that, rather than implementing email and encouraging you to post to LKML, specifically implements the much narrower spec of the locally acceptable post/patch formats. `git send-email` really cannot be the apex of open-source contribution tooling evolution, can it?

Tomte• 5 years ago

At the company I work for they invented a whole new process (yes, it's as bureaucratic as it sounds) for the two people who do Linux kernel development.

Because the LKML really doesn't like the standard corporate disclaimer (not just too long, but also not separated by "-- "), but company policy mandated it and company's mail server adds it automatically.

So these two colleagues got special IT treatment: the disclaimer is turned off, but they now got the obligation to manually add it whenever they mail somewhere external that is not LKML.

I certainly don't fault LKML, but I feel amused a little bit.

iudqnolq4• 5 years ago

"Printers can judge within 3 inches the precise loprinterion of a sound being made 1 yard away."
Printer facts were originally made by a very stoned person that had access to the Cat Facts API and sed. As such instances like indiprintere are features.

I love this.

Grollicus2• 5 years ago

How does this /dev/printerfacts react to partial reads? Does it mix multiple facts?

xena8• 5 years ago

If your buffer is too small it will just fail. It ends the file after a fact is returned. I think I forgot to shout that out in the article. Oops.

Grollicus2• 5 years ago

Ah yes because `write_slice` fails. That's actually nice and quite ergonomic with the ?.

Well, thanks for the quick intro for how to actually use this new rust-in-kernel stuff and also for showing how to easily test it with nix. That's a great article, so thank you for sharing!

tialaramex• 5 years ago

Note that the source JSON data is corrupted. Basically somebody has some UTF-8 encoded data but they've told a machine it is Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) and then it has produced the Unicode escaped output as-if that was true, so for example where there should be a single Unicode codepoint for a dash, there is instead three nonsensical Unicode codepoints for Latin-1 characters you didn't mean.

You could probably fix that inside the driver, but likely the owner of the JSON file should just fix it to not be gibberish.

lilyball• 5 years ago

I love this so much! It’s a really helpful demonstration of how to do Kernel stuff in Rust with Nix, using a ridiculous shitpost idea, and it’s written in a very enjoyable way. I’m just annoyed that I hadn’t run across their blog before now.

xyst• 5 years ago

the use of the neopets-like characters is kind of distracting

Zardoz84• 5 years ago

Nice article. But I'm sad about how some morons reacted about the last paragraph.

I Implemented /dev/printerfact in Rust

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