[OpenIndiana-discuss] A rant

[Judah Richardson]

On Fri, Jan 29, 2021 at 2:46 PM Jedi Tek’Unum <jeditekunum at gmail.com> wrote:

> EVERY OS in existence is getting really long in the tooth (outdated)

The irony of this is we're on the discussion list of an OS distribution
whose fundamental underpinnings are decades old and that is the
continuation of a legacy OS.

and for the most part hasn’t innovated in a very long time. Ideally they
> would ALL be replaced.
>
I find this self-contradictory given the above.

>
> I’m not comparing “Linux” (the hoard of many each slightly different) to
> Illumos or derivatives specifically. My comment was purely general and yes,
> based on decades of experience with many OSes. You see, I LIVED the Unix
> “standards wars” where the industry painfully managed to iron out the many
> minor differences that had no business existing. Then Linux came along and
> ignored much of it - creating a whole new pile of ridiculous variances that
> were just plain stupid.

The moral of Linux's rise incumbent OSes need to give their users what they
want, or other projects will and the incumbents won't like how the other
projects go about it.

Look at any large multiplatform software product (the last one I was paid
> to develop was 10’s of millions of lines of code) and you will find ifdef
> hell for absolutely no good reason. Ever wonder why autoconf exists? Can
> you take any “Linux” binary and run on any Linux distribution for the same
> architecture?
>
For the most part if you're on a mainstream distro or one based on them,
yes. Binaries tend to work across the same ISA for kernel versions they're
compatible with. That said, packaging is the way to go. For more on binary
compat, especially back-compat, see Windows ;)

>
> I came from the world of “big iron” supercomputers and large enterprise
> computing. People like me didn’t used to use toys like Linux (or *BSD for
> that matter) for industrial-strength computing where data and calculations
> and reliability were highly valuable. We used products that were designed
> for the job - Solaris, SPARC, etc.

I learned Fortran on Sun Workstations myself, and was assigned an AIX
workstation in my 1st job.

I developed plenty of stuff for IBM/AIX and HP/HPUX and while they were
> more trustworthy than the toys, they couldn’t hold a candle to the good
> stuff. Have you ever seen a massive heavily used server with an uptime over
> 10 years? I have.
>
The need for reboots due to necessary kernel patching pretty much killed
the uptime bragging thing. Nowadays I daresay unless you have an actual
mainframe extended uptime is actually a sign of poor security hygiene.

>
> What I see today is a software industry with zero innovation (Sun &
> Solaris WERE the last innovators). Countless resources spent on cloning,
> porting, maintaining hoards of duplications. Software descending in
> quality. Lots of arguing about which pile of shit is best.
>
Modern software aims to serve the user as opposed to making the user suffer
through some kind of "sacred" learning experience while developers remain
intransigent to their needs. Shockingly, it turns out that the people who
pay for the stuff (or support for it) tend to drive the bus as far as how
the stuff functions or operates. If a project doesn't behave the way its
customers or users want, another project that does rises, "standards",
philosophies, and sacred cows be damned.

>
> I thank the universe every day that I no longer have to polish turds that
> day.
>
Observe, adapt, conquer.

>
> Your attitude here is the same as I’ve seen from many people over many
> decades. I’ve felt the same way in my younger more naive days. I’ll give
> you this parting advice - it won’t make a bit of difference.
>
> > On Jan 28, 2021, at 9:31 PM, Hung Nguyen Gia via openindiana-discuss <
> openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org> wrote:
> >
> > Anyone here seems to be hated Linux too much. Does it because their bad
> past experience with it or simply because Linux is success and we are loser
> and the natural law of the loser hate the winner?
> >
> > Someone used to said Linux is a cesspool because it's only a kernel and
> hacked together to create a working system.
> >
> > Today I cloned illumos-gate and I see the completely different.
> >
> > I think Linux is more organized than Illumos.
> >
> > Saying Linux is a hacked together work is hypocrite and indeed slapping
> back into our own faces.
> >
> > We are no different. Illumos is a hacked together work and was an
> product of an desperate attempt to continue OpenSolaris.
> >
> > We are a mess, too.
> >
> > Indeed I found we are more like Linux than the BSDs.
> >
> > The large part of our userland is GNU anyway.
> >
> > Back to the rant: where actually things were put?
> >
> > I have did many 'find . -name' commands to try to discover where things
> were put.
> >
> > I want to find the source code of pcfs, aka msdosfs.
> >
> > The source files with pcfs as part of their names scattered across the
> source tree, the same for ufs.
> >
> > Which one is the true one to look for?
> >
> > I really hope we could be as 'a mess' as Linux, where things were put
> organized into linux/fs: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/fs
> >
> > Oh no, headers scattered everywhere. Which headers really needed and
> what they are actually for?
> >
> > It might took ages to find the answer.
> >
> > Yet the hypocrites still accused Linux of putting everything into
> /usr/include. Yes, you, too, the BSDs.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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>
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