
Bash as a Service  - dwynings
http://www.devthought.com/2012/03/13/bash-as-a-service/
======
mkjones
Sounds like "root my box as a service."

As one of the commenters there points out, you can just do this with ssh.
Which means you're ssh'ing to a machine you probably control, which means you
would have had to install the stuff you want at some point on that machine
anyway. Why not just do all your development from that machine (or, if you
don't want to, why not just install the package on your local machine?).

~~~
sciurus
I think the authors idea is that you would ssh to a machine that someone else
controls and is providing access to. E.G. For a dollar a month I'll give you
shell access to a machine where I've set up ImageMagick, and I'll give you a
set of scripts that make running ImageMagic commands on your machine
transparently run them on mine instead.

~~~
286c8cb04bda
Yes, the value here is in 'where I've set up ImageMagick'.

If I have a task that could be made easier by having ImageMagick, but I don't
have it on any machine I have easy access to, then I have to deal with the
overhead of getting the package, installing the package, configuring the
package, and possibly removing the package when I'm done.

Even though I know how to do all things, it would take me some time to get it
all done, and then I'd have to waste brainpower in those things, and not the
real problem I'm trying to solve.

A lot of that is solved by the "better" distributions, e.g. Debian has nearly
everything under the sun.

But not everything. That's where the opportunity might be.

I probably wouldn't pay a dollar a month just for ImageMagick, but I might pay
a few for shell access to a machine that has all of the new and shiny things
available, things too new to get into the main repositories, and keeps them
up-to-date and keeps adding new stuff, so I don't have to handle the sysadmin
tasks for yet-another-box.

------
dgl
"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." \--
Henry Spencer

~~~
secoif
How is this reinventing unix, at all?

~~~
TheCapn
The thread where mkjones is parent explains why mostly.

The issue is that you use remote utilities hosted by other resources but as
people already pointed out there are utilities provided already that
essentially allow this. What " _ru_ " would potentially be is more of a
wrapper or alias to existing commands.

I feel that the quote he references in general would simply state that if
users are seeking the ability to execute commands on a remote host then there
are security implications. We have secure tools for accessing remote hosts and
working but generating a catch-all utility would be an act of "reinventing the
wheel"

------
kaiju
I'm impressed that he's managed to come up with a brand new solution to a
problem that doesn't actually exist.

~~~
secoif
Disagree, there are plenty of problems this solves. For example, this service
could allow users of certain platforms to utilize tools that don't compile or
are difficult to compile on certain platforms.

------
oofabz
Why would you want to use a remote service instead of just installing the
software on your local machine? Most software is quite small and it would be
much more reliable this way as it wouldn't rely on a network connection to a
second machine.

Seriously why would you not want to install pygmentize? It's Python, so it
runs everywhere. The Debian package is 332 kB, so it's not wasting disk space.
What possible motivation do you have to pay someone a fee to run it on their
computer instead?

~~~
emmelaich
You cannot, in _general_ , _easily_ install software on your machine. That is,
I can find quite a few examples for which a particular version or some
particular software won't install on _your_ particular machine/OS combination.

~~~
icebraining
Remember we're talking about CLI software. While I don't doubt you can find
some examples of CLI programs that are hard to install on Debian, I doubt
they're nearly enough to justify something like this.

Even if it's not packaged, 'tar xf file.tar && ./configure && make &&
checkinstall' doesn't require any particular effort to someone used to the
shell, and you only have to do it once for each program.

------
endlessvoid94
Actually, you can do a lot of this using "heroku run bash". And it's pretty
awesome.

My understanding is that their vulcan build system [1] is a similar thing
optimized for compiling things.

[1] <https://github.com/heroku/vulcan>

------
krupan
Before he got too far into it, I think he might be talking about 0install:
<http://0install.net/>

Close, but 0install runs the apps on your local machine.

------
aw3c2
That website without Javascript <http://i.imgur.com/iMnNI.jpg>

