@MichaelHomer are you around?

@terdon Yes

Hi. What's wrong with this answer?

@terdon It's a comment.

It doesn't answer the question, which is "why do I get this syntax error", it just says it doesn't get it.

(sorry I'm in a call)

Hey guys, am I allowed to ask questions here?

@AllTheFish it’s usually better to ask questions on the main site

You just did

@MichaelHomer doh :D

@StephenKitt ok I will

If it's a question that's on-topic on the site, best to go there. If it's a meta-question, perhaps here

@MichaelHomer It also gives the right command:

> Maybe watch 'ps aux | grep foo' is what you are thinking of?

So, the answer is basically "I don't know why you would get that error, I can't reproduce it, but the command you are looking for is actually foo"

We don't even know that that is the right command

That seems like a perfectly decent answer.

It certainly doesn't solve the actual problem

@MichaelHomer Depends on what the actual problem is. I suspect that it actually does solve the problem and the OP wants to watch the ps and the grep together.

The next question will be "I'm running watch 'ps aux | grep foo' and it says bash: syntax error near unexpected token }'`. How do I fix it?"

How can changing the watch command to a different watch command possibly stop a syntax error from bash?

@MichaelHomer it could if the syntax error is from a grep alias or function

True! That's what we need type grep for.

In any case, it is an answer in that it is an honest attempt to answer the question. I mean, it's not giving something completely irrelevant. It might be a wrong answer, but still an answer as far as I can tell.

And yep, the syntax error is irrelevant, apparently:

sigh

It doesn't attempt to solve the actual problem reported in the question

@MichaelHomer that really depends on whether the OP actually cares about the syntax error

or just being able to watch his foo processes

What they care about does not impact on what the actual problem reported in the question is

It's an unclear question, yes

I agree it’s nice to solve the real problem

but sometimes people don’t care

@MichaelHomer Depends on what you consider to be the real problem.

I actually think the real real problem is that the OP wants to watch the output of ps aux | grep foo and is instead trying to watch the ps and grep the output of watch.

So the answer is indeed answering the real problem.

Or can be.

At least, there should be some reason to think that the solution in the answer would actually solve the problem, and there's none whatsoever.

I disagree. But OK.

As you can see from the OP's edit, they didn't actually care about (apparently don't even have) the syntax error.

Given the question, the most likely problem would be that something next to the command was ill-formed.

And still is, really

Given the OP's edit, it is also likely the syntax error was never actually there in the first place. Who knows.

@terdon IMHO, an answer should explain what the issue is and why it's an issue. Then go on to say how to solve it and why.

@Kusalananda Yes. I felt the answer did that. It's just that the issue it decided to focus on is what the OP (seems) to want to do and not the syntax error.

amisax's answer does that.

@Kusalananda They're essentially the same answer.

Hi folks. Just upgraded to stretch. That wasn't fun. Just managed to get back into my account.

I'm not thrilled by the new version of stable. Upgrading is rather like a forced relocation.

Well, I should say, not thrilled by the KDE in the new version of stable.

My mistake. It looks like I wasn't running KDE at all. Or Plasma, to be precise.

@FaheemMitha wait... what were you running? Did you accidentally install GNOME?

@derobert When I logged in to `sddm, the default wasn't Plasma. I'm not sure what it is, but I didn't like it much.

Fortunately KDE hasn't changed much.

No, KDE didn't decide to reinvent the desktop this release. Since Jessie its been a lot of refinement and bug fixing.

But I had a lot of trouble getting logged in to start with. kdm got removed, and sddm was not installed, so when I tried to log in, X wouldn't start up at all.

The X error messages were most unhelpful, but I finally figured out it was probably the display manager by a process of elimination.

@FaheemMitha if you have logs and can figure out why, file a bug to get a warning added to the release notes

The X error message via normal boot completely ignored /var/log/xorg.log. Which was a giveaway.

But I could bring up X via startx. And then it did mention /var/log/xorg.log.

So I figured something must be going wrong with whatever was having to start X up. But it was most annoying.

@derobert Figure out why kdm was removed and sddm was not installed?

@FaheemMitha well kdm was killed off upstream, but its weird sddm didn't get installed

Well, the apt logs presumably have logs of what happened, but they really should have taken some care to make sure that kdm was replaced by sddm.

@derobert I don't follow. BTW, are you using Plasma on stretch anyway?

Because if so, I'm getting weird behavior in one menu option.

KDE got rid of kdm, and replaced it with sddm. That's why kdm was removed — its obsolete, no longer supported upstream. But something went wrong that your machine was left without sddm

@FaheemMitha yes, using plasma on, well, testing now. But close to stretch still

@derobert Right. I didn't follow the apt-get upgrade, apt-get dist-upgrade exactly. But even so...

@derobert Ok. If I do right-click -> Add Panel -> Default Panel, my whole background goes black, and right click stops doing anything.

Might be some weird artifact of the nvidia drivers, I suppose. But it's disconcerting.

Hmmm... I haven't added a panel in a while... I'll try.

oh yeah, that just crashed plasma

I'm not even sure what a panel is. Is it those things at the top and the bottom of the screen with the icons?

also on nvidia on this box

@FaheemMitha yep, those are the panels

@derobert Hmm. Would you care to file a bug report? You'd probably do a better job of it...

You could cc me on it.

@derobert alsa -> also?

@FaheemMitha yeah

You could mention we are both using nvidia.

Anyone here who is running Plasma on stretch and not using nvidia?

plasmashell is segfaulting

@derobert How can you tell?

@FaheemMitha I have it on an Intel laptop as well

@derobert Have what?

@FaheemMitha to get back the background you can run plasmashell in a terminal

then you can watch it segfault

@FaheemMitha KDE Plasma

@derobert I see.

@derobert On stretch?

yep

Ok. What do you get there?

No clue, it's at home so I can't test it.

I'd actually like a menu at the bottom of the right hand monitor. Any idea how I can do this without this menu? Plus, it doesn't say where it's going to put a panel. So I don't understand how it works.

@FaheemMitha at least for me, once I restart plasma it turns out it actually created the new panel

though if you just want the menu, you probably want to add a new empty one, not default one

I have two monitors. Actually, the top and bottom of the left hand monitor has a panel. I don't really need either, and I'd really like to get rid of the top one.

@derobert What's the difference?

@FaheemMitha default one starts with a bunch of widgets in it (menu, desktop switcher, app list, systray, clock...) and crashes; empty one starts empty (and for me, does not crash)

@derobert Ah, ok. But does empty show the current windows on my desktop? I mostly want that.

@FaheemMitha it will if you add the app switcher to it

so, appears plasma is segfaulting from a stack overflow....

@derobert Ok. And how does it decide vs top/bottom? And I suppose it picks the monitor the mouse is currently on?

@derobert Are you going to try to debug it? :-)

@FaheemMitha not sure, but you can change all that once the panel is created

@derobert Ok, I'll try an empty one. One sec.

@FaheemMitha going to at least get a good backtrack. I'm looking forward to sending a multi-megabyte bug report :-/

@derobert backtrace? And I thought the BTS had an attachment limit.

I'm sure it does. Clearly compression will be required.

stack trace is at least 50,000 frames deep....

I tried creating an empty one. It looks like it might have created it on the right side of the left monitor. And there seems to be a default one of the left side of the left monitor. So now one on all four sides. Yay.

Plus (possibly unrelated) the windows don't seem to be moving around very well. Not responding to the mouse.

So, how does one delete a panel?

Hmm, the sluggishness may be just Konsole.

Ok, I found a helpful page that told me how to remove panels. Go through a bunch of menu entries, in short.

panel menu -> more settings -> remove

@derobert Yes, that's it.

AFK. Back in a few minutes.

I turned off paging. I wonder how long bt full will take....

76882 frames!

@FaheemMitha do you want the bug cc'd to you?

I'm guessing yes, so I added you to X-Debbugs-CC

@derobert Yes, please.

@FaheemMitha You should have #865544 by now

@derobert Yes, I see it. Do you think they will deal with it?

No idea if it'll get a stable update. Hopefully it'll at least get fixed in unstable

Still need to add a panel at the bottom of my right monitor.

Ok, this is odd. I ran the empty panel creation a few times. Now I have three empty panels on the sides of my left monitor, and now the empty panel creation isn't doing anything. I thought it might proceed to the right monitor, but no. I wonder if it's worth asking on the site.

@derobert You should check and see if this still happens on your Intel box.

@FaheemMitha if I remember when I get home...

@derobert ok

Any idea about how to add a panel at the bottom of my right monitor? It's a bit frustrating.

I guess I could ask a question about it here, though I'm not holding my breath.

Hard to believe nobody discovered that bug before release, even if it does only manifest with the nvidia proprietary drivers.

Adding a panel isn't a common action. I mean, you get your desktop set up then you hardly ever do it again...

And if you do want to add another, its probably a blank one

@derobert I suppose.

@derobert Good news! Apparently it's possible to move panels from one monitor to the other. So I dragged the panel at the bottom of the left monitor to the bottom of the right.

@FaheemMitha Shocking! A desktop environment having behavior that might almost be intuitive!

@derobert I must admit I didn't expect it. And it sounds like you didn't know it was possible either.

@FaheemMitha Well, all my KDE Plasma setups only have a single monitor....

@derobert Oh, you surprise me.

My workstation at home is dual-monitor, but I haven't migrated it to KDE yet. It's still running e16(!)

I somehow imagine you at work surrounded with monitors.

BTW, I wonder why there is rarely anyone else in this room. Where do all the people discussing bug reports go?

@FaheemMitha discussing bug reports? I donno. I'd guess IRC, maybe? Or mailing lists?

Well, I don't see what's wrong with here.

IRC has some nice advantages. Like being free software, for example. And much lighter-weight than a web browser.

Disadvantages too, of course.

But Debian is never, e.g., going to make unix.se an official forum because it's not free

Fair point. Though discussing free software on a non-free forum doesn't make the software non-free.

It's a pity we don't live in a world where services like SE can be truly free.

@FaheemMitha To be honest, I don't see how that would make anything better.

It is a free (as in beer) service, it's pretty good all things considered and it's working. Why would it benefit from having open source?

I suspect they could open source SE without any trouble, but there is a chance it'd not work out for them. And not much benefit. So I can see why they don't. I'd quite possibly make the same choice in their shoes.

Hi @terdon. So someone else is actually here? Sometimes I forget that.

I am, obviously, all for open source, but I don't really see what difference it would make here.

@FaheemMitha :P

Not only are you two not alone, there are various other people and everything you say is set in stone and preserved for posterity in the transcript.

@terdon they might get a few patches from the community.

Personally I prefer free software. But the free software like SE hasn't really been successful.

@terdon yay?

@terdon All those other people aren't terribly talkative.

BTW: there was a post on Hacker News a few days back about what people want in the next version of Debian. Particularly surprising was people who consider mailing lists hard. Huh???

@derobert They might have some difficulty, considered it's all written in proprietary languages using proprietary tools.

@FaheemMitha It's a very widely used stack.

@derobert Hard in what sense?

@FaheemMitha news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580995

@derobert But not free. I suppose that technically you can have free software written only using proprietary languages and proprietary technology. Off the top of my head I don't know what stance the Free Software Guidelines etc. would take on that.

> Another big reason Debian is very hard to contribute to is the main discussion takes place via mailing lists. I understand that many people enjoy working with them, but for light usage they are a big pain. Submitting and history are in completely different programs, there seems to be no real threading, volume is often high and reading large amounts of emails is a chore to me. A solution here would be an improved mailing list archive with options for replying directly integrated to the site.

@derobert Whoever wrote that does have a point. That's part of what makes forums like SE useful.

@FaheemMitha Well, it couldn't go in main, of course, since it wouldn't be buildable in main. But such things are common on e.g., Windows

Though I don't understand the conclusion, that it makes Debian hard to contribute to.

I also find mailing lists a pain.

@derobert Well, I was just wondering if it would be considered free software. By the FSF, for example.

@FaheemMitha yes, I think so. Let me try to find a page...

Wow, that's a long thread. By HN standards, at least.

It does seem odd that Debian still uses mailing lists. There's been a revolution in the ways people have of exchanging information online, why are they still stuck in a system developed more than 30 years ago?

@terdon Free software communities are quite tradition-minded.

And Debian as an organization is probably even more conservative than the average.

Yes.

Having said that, it's not clear what the alternative(s) would be.

But seriously, mailing lists? I suppose I could find something that is less practical and harder to use but I honestly can't think of one off the top of my head.

@FaheemMitha Well, Usenet was pretty nice....

I'm actually a big fan of email. Though it's certainly not the answer to everything.

@derobert True. Debian has never made systematic use of newsgroups.

@FaheemMitha Even forums would be better. Something like SE where people can vote even better. Anything that provides clear threads, search and categorization.

@terdon I'm curious—how are they hard to use? You sign up, the messages gets dumped in a folder, organized by threads. You can hit one key to reply.

@terdon Debian has a sort-of SE equivalent. But it's basically dead. I forget what it's called.

@FaheemMitha It works fine for small conversations between a few people. It's awful if you're in a mailing lists with dozens each of whom sends out their own reply, going off on tangents etc.

@derobert I think he means as a way of organizing information for later retrieval.

As one example.

@derobert I am thinking more about the versions of the lists that are stored online.

Though I don't mean to speak for terdon.

@FaheemMitha They do sort of suck for that, though search has helped a lot. They're good for discussion, not for knowledge bases.

Also, I dislike the idea of having to receive all emails just to get the ones I might be interested in.

@FaheemMitha Nah, that's one of my main issues with them, indeed.

@derobert Sure, but it's nice for the results of discussion not to disappear into the ether.

And sure, search helps to a limited extent. But an organization like SE is better. And it's probably better to do better than SE, though I don't know how, off the top of my head.

@FaheemMitha Well, not really disappear, but yeah. That's one of a few things that strike me as really could use improvement: a good way to turn discussion results into knowledge base. The other is the encouragement of massive number of replies.

Before SE, the only way of getting information was to search the net for random usenet and mailing list threads, with no guaranteed answers.

@derobert They don't if they are publicly archived, that's true. But that is not guaranteed. And archives can be lost.

"a good way to turn discussion results into knowledge base" is a big part of what SE is about, isn't it?

Though it might be almost the only kind of its thing in the world. At least on a big scale.

@FaheemMitha Many mailing lists are archived by several independent sites. For example, the Debian lists are archived by Debian, by gmane, by mail-archive.com, by a bunch more. As opposed to e.g., unix.se which is available... in one place.

@derobert That's a good point.

Though I think you can download the entire SE archive, at least in theory. But it would need to be set up before it could be used.

On the other hand, the format means that the way they're archived is, perforce, not very useful.

And the software isn't free, so that is basically impossible.

@terdon The SE format?

@terdon I'm not sure what's wrong with receiving all the emails—I mean, they're plain text. Loading unix.se once probably uses more bandwidth than an entire month of most mailing lists.

To some extent free-form discussions can contain more useful knowledge that a SE question + answers. But at the end of the day, it's good to have an answer.

@FaheemMitha Getting post content back on the web wouldn't be that hard. Getting it back fully useful (e.g., all the various SE features) would be a huge undertaking.

It's really annoying to read an email thread and at the end of it, there is no answer. Or someone says - my problem is solved. Thanks guys. And disappears.

@derobert Agreed. But all those features are important.

@derobert I hate spam. And things I am not interested in may as well be spam. More importantly, when you receive too many emails, you loose the one you actually cared to read in the noise.

@FaheemMitha No, the mailinglist archives.

A chronological listing isn't terribly useful in many ways.

@terdon That's what made gmane useful. Mailing lists emulating newsgroup.

Never used it, so I have no opinion.

@terdon Well, you (hopefully!) filter any high-volume list to its own folder. But that's not really any different than e.g., trying to read every question that pops up here. I agree that the volume they can reach is often a problem. But you can't follow everything on Stack Overflow, either.

Filtering properly set up mailing lists is easy, e.g.,:

if header :matches "List-Id" "*<debian-*.lists.debian.org>" {
        fileinto :create "Lists/Debian/${2}";
        stop;
}

... is a Sieve rule that works on almost all Debian lists.

@derobert No, but those I can filter by tags etc and if I miss something it's no big deal. If I am trying to take part ion a conversation, however, missing stuff can be an issue.

I dunno. As soon as an email thread gets more than three or four messages, I find it hard to follow who's replying to whom and for what.

Oh, hey, nice rep @derobert!

111!

@terdon which MUA are you using? Doesn't it display them in thread order?

I don't use one cause I stay away from mailing lists :)

Admittedly, if I were to use one and get used to it, I would probably find it less daunting.

But I stand here as an example of a relatively tech-savvy user who does find it daunting.

Perhaps only because of my ignorance, but I assume I am not alone.

That could be part of it. I imagine it'd be a nightmare to, e.g., try to follow an email thread from -devel on gmail, for example

Oh, for my regular email, I've been using Gmail for a few years now. I stopped using local mail clients a while ago.

But I never liked long email discussions before either. Dunno. And based on what I've seen in the mail archives you see online, the threads are pretty chaotic anyway.

Some of the threads are ridiculous—the mess about systemd, for example, as being the most recent terrible example

That's, I think, a general problem Debian has—there was an absurd amount of trolling, of presuming bad faith, of just general being a jerk in that. (To put it in language acceptable here.)

I have a feeling that almost anything Debian could have used instead of mailing lists would have had the same issue.

@terdon BTW: Have you seen any mailing list archives using HyperKitty? They're much nicer archives...

@derobert Oh man, I don't even want to imagine that one. Although, granted, that would have been a mess no matter what.

@derobert Not that I know of.

@terdon lists.fedoraproject.org/archives ... Fedora seems to use it

@derobert Yes, that's an improvement, true. I still need some more formatting though. Or, at least, a way of separating code from prose.

@derobert Not really. I used to read devel on and off for years. Once upon a time.

@terdon I'm not sure how it handles HTML emails. Or if it can do Markdown in email.

When people are staying on topic, it's actually pretty impressive.

But I think you used to read it too.

@FaheemMitha I still do. But in mutt, typically. Sometimes Thunderbird.

@derobert Oh? I'm surprised you can find the time.

@FaheemMitha It's normally not that bad, actually. And Mutt's ability to delete a thread (or subthread) when it gets bad helps a lot.

@derobert Not that bad? Meaning not that busy?

@FaheemMitha Yeah, not that busy

@FaheemMitha if you take a look at lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2017/06/threads.html there are 275 messages for the month so far. That's something like 12–13/day, not at all bad. And of course if there is a subthread I'm not interested in, I just delete it. And I scan the subjects—not read every message.

@derobert I recall it being more busy.

It used to be. It has quieted down a fair bit.

@derobert That does look like a big drop.

It was much harder to keep up with 2001-ish.

Though according to that graph, the number of members has continued to rise.

yep, that is interesting

@derobert And some written by you!

Here's another illustration of Debian's attitude towards non-free services, including some good points. Though SE does not sell Enterprise versions of its software, that I'm aware.

lwn.net/Articles/724986

Ugh, only support for Git repositories? That's terrible.

All the things being proposed are git-only, unfortunately

The generic solutions (like Forge, which Debian wants to get rid of) died out.

And there is nothing like GitLab for anything except Git, AFAIK.

@FaheemMitha Hang on though. There's a huge difference between Debian-devs wanting to use open source and non-developers wanting to. For a project like Debian which is full of people with the knowledge and desire to fiddle with the code of whatever they are using, it is essential that they stick to open source.

And certainly nothing like it that supports Git + Hg + SVN + CVS

However, I am not sure that can be extended to the users of Debian. Hell, I think I have only ever patched a single program I use in my life.

@terdon Sorry, I lost the thread of the argument. What was the point again?

@derobert I'm no fan of sourceforge, but I don't see what's so terrible about it.

Alioth has been in use for awhile.

@FaheemMitha Ehm. Far more likely I lost it. I've been switching between various things. I was referring back to the importance of using open source for various uses.

@FaheemMitha Spyware.

I think a Git monoculture would definitely be a bad thing.

@FaheemMitha SF is closed-source. Forge was based on a previous version that wasn't. Problem is, its dead. No one maintains it.

And I don't just say that because I don't use it.

So that's why they're getting rid of Alioth — it uses software that's dead.

ghacks.net/2013/07/17/…

@terdon No, I meant sourceforge in a general sense. Its forks aren't spyware.

Like what Alioth runs.

@derobert Hmm?

@terdon Ok. Sorry, I wasn't really keeping track.

@FaheemMitha You were, don't worry. I wasn't :)

I agree that Debian is different from the general community.

In that they might actually be able to maintain software, for example.

Though most of the time it ends up being like, one person.

@FaheemMitha My impression is that the Alioth maintainers consider their upstream no longer active...

@derobert And they don't want to be upstream?

No

Can't blame them. It's probably not a pretty code base, either.

Still, only Git? Ugh.

blog.snow-crash.org/blog/upcoming-alioth-sprint

I'd expect some protest about that.

@FaheemMitha There hasn't been much—it seems no one else wants to do the work, either.

@derobert Doing development for free is hard.

Still, the Git-only portion of that decision is unfortunate. But I'll stop repeating myself.

@FaheemMitha I don't think anyone actually decided they want git-only. AFAIK, they would like other VCSs to be supported. But when they went looking for software, git-only is what they found.

@derobert Yes, I realise that wasn't the intention. But I'm a bit concerned about the result.

Folks who like those other VCSs really need to work towards getting them supported by the various GitHub clones.

Or hang up the towel and declare git the winner.

(which I agree would be bad, it's nice to have ideas coming from multiple places!)

lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/alioth-staff-replacement/… and lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/alioth-staff-replacement/… too

@derobert Mercurial has Kallithea. A fork of RhodeCode.

Might want to suggest it to them, then....

Actually, looks like someone already has

But I expect it can't do everything that Github can.

Or GitLab, even.

@derobert Mercurial is actually innovating quite fast. They have the advantage of using Python.

Notably the Evolve extension. A very nice concept.