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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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I write a lot of scripts that engineers need to run. I used to really try to make things 'fail soft' so that even if one piece failed the rest of the script would keep running and let you know which components failed and what action you needed to take to fix the problem.
Eventually I had so many issues with people assuming that any errors that didn't result in a failure were safe to ignore and crucial manual steps were being missed. I had to start making them 'fail hard' and stop completely when a step failed because it was the only way to get people to reliably perform the desired manual step.
Trying to predict and account for other people's behavior is really tricky, particularly when a high level of precision is required.
It is a developer milestone :) when you learn to be a resilient applicant is about recovery situation you perfect understanding. Fail fast everything else. Repeat 1000 times, you have something
soft failures add complexity and ambiguity to your system, as it creates many paths and states you have to consider. It's generally a good idea to keep the exception handling simple, by failing fast and hard.
here is a nice paper, that highlights some exception handling issues in complex systems
https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/osdi14/osdi14-paper-yuan.pdf
This is why I enjoy programming libraries only I will ever use. "Do I need to account for user ignorance and run a bunch of early exit conditions at the beginning of this function to avoid throwing an exception? Naww, fuck it, I know what I'm doing."
It's the quickest way to prove to yourself that you know what you're doing... Most of the time, anyway...
Always fail soft in underlying code and hard in user space IMHO
Sounds familiar, haha.