Web Excursions 2022-05-12

From Copy to Reference

• Plenty of legal drafters see that we should really be incorporating more standard language by reference, instead of copy-pasting and short-order cooking.

• there’s an obvious theory of change: Shift from copying to referencing by doing both for a while.

• A huge advantage of incorporating standard language by reference is reviewing once and recognizing many times later, in new contexts.

Level 1: Copy in Text, Reference in Comment

I copied this language verbatim from AAA’s online ClauseBuilder tool at clausebuilder.org. I chose “Commercial” and “Arbitration”.

• redline.commonform.org is a free, handy site for comparing two bits of copy-and-pasted text.

Level 2: Copy in Text, Reference in Text

Incorporate here the AAA ClauseBuilder standard commercial arbitration clause from clausebuilder.org. Quoting just for convenience, with any conflicts resolved in favor of the standard:

Level 3: Reference in Text, Copy in Comment

Incorporate here the AAA ClauseBuilder standard commercial arbitration clause from clausebuilder.org.

And in case we think it might speed up review or avoid a confused reaction, we add a comment:

To save you the trip to ClauseBuilder: The truly paranoid counterparty will ignore this comment as not to be trusted.

• The problem with doing this—and the reason we don’t see arbitration clauses handled this way in practice, and shouldn’t—isn’t with our method.

  • It’s a problem with AAA. More specifically, with clausebuilder.org.

• Copying creates a full record we can lay rest in our client’s contract filing system.

  • we know we can dig the language up later.

• The problem is time and its ravages; the solution is archives and archivists.

  • The World Wide Web has a public archive, archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine.

  • There are also more specialized services like perma.cc for legal and academic writers.

  • We can use both, and more, to preserve legal terms for long-term reference.

  • All these pages start with links that point to dated snapshots of their content, complete with terms, archived by neutral third parties.

• To further predictability, each of these documents is also numbered.

  • Once a version is published, by strict policy, no change is ever made to its content.

Level 4: Just Reference in Text

• There is a need to seriously evolve legal drafting, efficiency-wise and substance-wise.

• More shared language, developed collaborative and incorporated prodigiously, will help.

Understanding the Bin, Sbin, Usr/Bin , Usr/Sbin Split

On Tuesday 30 November 2010 15:58:00 David Collier wrote:

I see that busybox spreads it's links over these 4 directories.

Is there a simple rule which decides which directory each link lives in.....

For instance I see kill is in /bin and killall in /usr/bin.... I don't have a grip on what might be the logic for that.

• Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix on a PDP-7 in 1969

  • around 1971 they upgraded to a PDP-11 with a pair of RK05 disk packs (1.5 megabytes each) for storage.

• When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their root filesystem)

  • they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the user home directories lived

  • (which is why the mount was called /usr).

• They

  • replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp...) and

  • wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of space

• When they got a third disk, they

  • mounted it on /home and

  • relocated all the user directories to there

  • so the OS could consume all the space on both disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES

• they made rules about "when the system first boots, it has to come up enough

  • to be able to mount the second disk on /usr,

  • so don't put things like the mount command /usr/bin

  • or we'll have a chicken and egg problem bringing the system up."

• The /bin vs /usr/bin split (and all the others) is an artifact of this,

  • a 1970's implementation detail that got carried forward for decades

  • by bureaucrats who never question why they're doing things.

  • It stopped making any sense before Linux was ever invented, for multiple reasons

• Early system bringup is the provice of initrd and initramfs, which deals with the "this file is needed before that file" issues.

  • We've already got a temporary system that boots the main system.

  • shared libraries (introduced by the Berkeley guys) prevent you from independently upgrading the /lib and /usr/bin parts.

    • They two partitions have to match or they won't work.

• Cheap retail hard drives passed the 100 megabyte mark around 1990,

  • and partition resizing software showed up somewhere around there

  • partition magic 3.0 shipped in 1997

• Of course once the split existed, some people made other rules to justify it.

• Root was for the OS stuff you got from upstream and /usr was for your site- local files.

  • Then / was for the stuff you got from AT&T and /usr was for the stuff that your distro like IBM AIX or Dec Ultrix or SGI Irix added to it,

  • and /usr/local was for your specific installation's files.

  • Then somebody decided /usr/local wasn't a good place to install new packages, so let's add /opt

• given 30 years to fester, this split made some interesting distro-specific rules show up and go away again,

  • such as "/tmp is cleared between reboots but /usr/tmp isn't".

• all this predated tmpfs.

• Standards bureaucracies like the Linux Foundation

  • (which consumed the Free Standards Group in its' ever-growing accretion disk years ago) happily

  • document and add to this sort of complexity without ever trying to understand why it was there in the first place.