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Policy of Transience

[Simon Tatham, 2025-05-09] I have several habits in my computer usage which are unusual by many people’s standards (although some more so than others), and which all kind of point in the same direction. At the time I adopted each one, I didn’t recognise this.

On Linux, I’m thinking of all those files you found reasons to edit in/etc, over the course of years, probably forgetting half of the changes you made a week after you’d done each one; the precise set of distro packages you installed, and why; the stuff you did with update-alternatives or similar; and so on. Those are installed in a more conventional way, and are subject to exactly this problem – if I did have a total backup failure and had to reinstall one of my machines completely from scratch, I’m sure it would be months before I stopped tripping over missing packages or confusingly different behaviour and got the system back to more or less how it had started out. And most shell commands are totally boring (the usual round of cd, mv, rm and the absolutely endless ls); the ones that are even potentially worth saving are easy to spot, because they’re the ones that stretch across three lines of my terminal and took ten tries to get right.

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