Whatever you do, don't run fsck. (It installs Windows 10)
Your wget
is broken and should DIE, dev tells Microsoft
Well, that didn't take long: within a week of applause for Microsoft's decision to open-source PowerShell, a comment-war has broken out over curl and wget. For those not familiar with these commands: they're open source command line tools for fetching internet content without a browser. Apart from obvious applications like …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 01:57 GMT thames
Taking over the wget and curl names to provide something incompatible and far less capable was incredibly stupid. That in itself is a breaking change.
It's as if Microsoft kept substituting MS Paint every time you tried to run Adobe Photoshop, and then refused to stop doing it because now some people might be used to clicking on the Photoshop icon to run MS Paint.
The user response isn't a factor of open source. It's a factor of people having a communication platform to respond to problems which isn't controlled by Microsoft and can't be silenced by their PR people.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 04:05 GMT Notas Badoff
Relating to the outside world
It is when Microsoft's world and the real world interact that we find out how narrow and small is Microsoft's understanding of, or experience with, the real world. Way back when it was considered by them a negative if you had any experience with other operating systems or non-native toolsets. I think that must still be true. This is self-inflicted, just like stack ranking. Very sad. Very predictable.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 08:14 GMT Mage
Re: Applause and wget
I've had the windows build of wget for ages on XP, without ANY *nix shell or Powershell thing.
What applause? I never noticed any. This is a halfbaked project.
I use Linux now for everyday netbook & workstation. XP, Win98 etc on some old HW for legacy HW I/O to program old gear via serial or parallel ports.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 12:03 GMT John Sanders
When Microsoft's world and the real world interact...
It is not even that, PowerShell solved (more or less badly and for the second time [wscript anyone]) an issue that existed in the Windows side of things.
PowerShell does not solve any problem in Linux, this is not a question of PowerShell being better or worse, PowerShell does not provide anything on Linux that's not there already in a better more refined fashion.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 04:59 GMT Robert Helpmann??
Too little, too late
"It's a factor of people having a communication platform to respond to problems which isn't controlled by Microsoft and can't be silenced by their PR people."
Such a shame it wasn't in place prior to Windows 8. Perhaps criticism of PS will convince them to scrap it and start from scratch. I mean, whatever they came up with would have to be better, right? Right?
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 08:00 GMT Sirius Lee
This seems like just an anti-Microsoft gripe from the Linux fundamentalists.
#1 PowerShell aliases are not commands on the command line except in the PowerShell command environment, so don't use it.
#2 PowerShell command aliases can be changed.
Don't want wget to do what it currently does? Then change the alias which is a reference to .NET assembly entry point.
There is an opportunity here for an enterprising developer to provide a PowerShell module to change the aliases so they more closely meet the expectations of Linux users.
Or on the other hand, we can be subjected to the usual whining expected from Linux users when confronted by anything from Microsoft.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 09:46 GMT Roo
"This seems like just an anti-Microsoft gripe from the Linux fundamentalists."
We see the same complaints from MS Office lovers every time folks suggest LibreOffice can be used in place of MS Office. Plus in this case MS are intentionally ripping off brand names with the intention of fooling people into thinking they are using the real deal. I'm pretty sure the MS community at large wouldn't react any better to LibreOffice renaming their products Excel, Word, Access and Powerpoint.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 12:11 GMT John Sanders
Wintards thing everything must work like it does in Windows...
No, and a thousand times NO!
In a Unix box (not just Linux) the distinction between the shell and the utilities is: NONE. (The system's design makes automation-shell functionality an inherent quality of the OS)
The integration is provided by the environment itself, there is no requirement for a program to do anything to be integrated in the shell, and the shell doesn't need to do anything special to interact with a program and automate things.
To achieve object-level functionality as you do in PowerMeh! all that is required is to have something in the environment that the shell can use and there you go.
We call that Perl/PHP/Python.
I haven't bothered to check PowerMeh! for Linux, but if MS have done things correctly in the Unix style I should be able to leverage PowerMeh! and .net scripting from bash or ksh without having to do anything special.
However I seriously doubt that a lot (Microsoft doing things correctly) every piece of Unix related stuff that I have seen from Microsoft was a pile of crap.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 15:28 GMT Ken Hagan
"Don't want wget to do what it currently does? Then change the alias which is a reference to .NET assembly entry point."
And then convince all of your customers to do the same.
You sound like all those people who say that <insert offensive desktop feature here> isn't a problem because I can change it. Yeah, but we aren't *all* hobbyists playing in our bedrooms, so the out-of-the-box behaviour matters. It is what our customers will be using whether we like it or not.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 20:36 GMT Lars
"the usual whining expected from Linux users when confronted by anything from Microsoft.".
So how usual do you think this "confrontation" between Linux uses and Microsoft is. Is it not rather Microsoft that is confronted with something they so desperately tried to kill. It must be at least twenty years since I read about Microsoft guys who claimed the shell was "killed" on Windows because people high up in the organization did not understand why a user would ever need it and because it looked so old-fashioned.
The name PowerShell tells a lot about Microsoft, does it not. You might also notice that apparently some Linux users have voluntarily decided to try it out.
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 00:18 GMT Trixr
I love PowerShell and use it hourly at work, but I think it's bloody stupid idea from MS.
It's bad enough they aliased "ls" to Get-ChildItem without (again) the same functionality, but creating default aliases that mask well-known tools that exist outside the shell is stupid.
If you want to create your own aliases inside PowerShell, that's all good, and if you want to use a well-known name for whatever you've rolled, that's up to you. But introducing it as a default, stupid.
Thanks for giving the rest of us grown-up and real-world Windows admins a bad name (18+ years Windows experience, but I'm also a RHCT).
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 08:09 GMT Dazed and Confused
provide something incompatible and far less capable
MS don't need to break their broken SW here, they could use an environment variable to specify whether users want the "old" broken MS curl & wget or whether they want the get the real curl and wget. This is how Unix and Linux systems have dealt with these types of problems for years.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 08:20 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Nothing new
"People still used FTP?"
well windows didn't have an ssh implementation for using scp until very recently. And I have to wonder whether or not any of the "standard ssh features" are BROKE-DICK in the *new* PowerSmell
except, of course, cygwin. scp works fine there. so does rsync. yeah.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 14:51 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Nothing new
"well windows didn't have an ssh implementation for using scp until very recently. "
But it supports https which is more firewall friendly...You can use Powershell to copy files from the command line - for instance:
Invoke-Command -UseSSL -SessionOption MyServerName {get-content -encoding byte -readcount 0 "C:\windows\system32\notepad.exe" } -Credential $cred |Set-Content -Encoding byte c:\temp\foooooooo.exe
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 15:38 GMT MacroRodent
Re: Nothing new
>People still used FTP?
I still often find it to be the only common way to move files between unlike systems. Even if a better alternative is available for some OS; it may not have been installed by whoever is in charge of the system I need to communicate with. Or there is stupidly configured firewall blocking the way for other methods. I don't think FTP is going away any time soon...
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 13:25 GMT Seajay#
Re: Nothing new
People still used FTP?
Maybe I'm feeding the troll here but I'm going to do it anyway. FTP is great because it's an old universally established standard, and that trumps almost all other considerations. As an example, after spending a long time trying various cloud file sync services for home use I've discovered that what I really wanted all along was just an ftp server running on my main machine. Because lots of applications support ftp they can do the sync, merge and conflict resolution stuff at application level which works enormously better than a sync client which presents applications with what appears to be a local file system then tries to sort out the conflicts itself (which is fundamentally impossible if I have made changes to, for example, a keepass file on two separate machines).
Integration is one of the most irritating bits of IT. 90% of the time, what you lose to network inefficiency by using FTP over something like rsync is insignificant compared to the hassle of getting more sophisticated systems to actually bloody talk to each other.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 05:52 GMT Flocke Kroes
If only ...
If only their were implementations of curl and wget available in source code form on the internet that could be compiled for Windows and distributed for free. Microsoft would be able ship software that has survived decades of testing by demanding techies without having to go to the expense of creating, testing and debugging their own versions.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 16:21 GMT Carlie J. Coats, Jr.
Re: If only ...
Back many years ago, at their press conference where they introduced Windows NT, the Microsof marketroids doing the presentation claimed, "It complies with POSIX. In particular, it has the Korn shell, 'ksh'."
When one of the audience claimed, "No, you've got ksh semantics wrong", the marketroid replied, "No I assure you that it is correct."
"No, it isn't."
"Sir, I assure that our experts have looked at it, and..."
Interruption from another member of the audience, "Look, asshole -- that's David Korn himself!"
So this broken wget is typical Microsoft.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 05:57 GMT Steve Davies 3
They are quick to shutter services
when they "embrace" a company (absorb them into the MS-Borg) yet when they clearly make a balls up they say that it will have to go out to RFC because someone might have used their shite in a week?
And because they want to play by the rules....
After a while the RFC will be forgotten and people will accept the MS versions of wget and curl as the defacto ones.
I just get a feeling this is the first attack in their plan to subvert the FOSS movement from the inside.
If that is the taste of MS to come then watch out FOSS.
come on Redmond, just pull the Powershell release from Github until you fix it properly. Otherwise folks, use at your own risk with wearing a full Hazmat suit and a 40ft barge pole.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 12:22 GMT John Sanders
Re: They are quick to shutter services
>> Otherwise folks, use at your own risk with wearing a full Hazmat suit and a 40ft barge pole.
No one other than testimonials will use PowerMeh! in Linux because there is no god-damn point to it in the first place!
This is like trying to come out with a device for voice communication over wires with a limit of 100m and call it "talkphone" when the world already has "telephones" that go over any distance and can even be wireless.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 14:53 GMT springsmarty
Re: They are quick to shutter services
> No one other than testimonials will use PowerMeh! in Linux because there is no god-damn point to it in the first place!
Disagree. From time to time I need to maintain some stuff in Azure via Powershell, and up until now I had to keep a Windows VM instance just for that.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 06:10 GMT Neoc
Usual Microsoft behaviour
Take a well known item non-microsoft (curl, wget, kerberos), make it available in windows, change it so the window version is not compliant with the non-microsoft version, refuse to make windows version compliant because "it might break out shit", push windows version of said item, call non-microsoft version "broken" because it doesn't play well with windows' version.
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Wednesday 24th August 2016 08:59 GMT oldcoder
Re: Usual Microsoft behaviour
The order is a bit off:
1. change it so the Windows version is not compliant with the non-microsoft version
2. make it available in Windows
3. claim the Windows version is compliant
4. refuse to make the Windows version compliant
5. push windows version of said item
6. call non-Microsoft version "broken"
Hey - works for AD, being broken with LDAP/Kerberos/Bind.
Microsoft doesn't even know how its own software works as MS had to get help from the Samba project for the EU mandated documentation.
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 06:23 GMT Ralph B
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
This is a classic Microsoft tactic.
The strategy's three phases are:
- Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
- Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the 'simple' standard.
- Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
It looks like nothing has changed under Nadella. Zero, zip, zilch, nada. (I guess the clue was in the name.)
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Tuesday 23rd August 2016 08:36 GMT Lee D
I assigned my tech a task of turning a Server Core installation into a Server GUI installation remotely using nothing but PowerShell. This involves getting the original Server ISO onto the machine somehow and then running commands that add on the GUI features from the files on that ISO.
They weren't allowed to use any file they couldn't download from the PowerShell interface itself, though, so it became a real chore.
The "fake" wget command on PowerShell craps out on anything unusual. You can't get large files. You can't get secure files properly. You can't resume. You can't do anything with it.
In the end, the documentation started with a step that used PowerShell "wget" to download the REAL wget (from a plain HTTP website), and then carry on from there. Anything else was just too much messing about with strange errors and failed downloads.