[OpenIndiana-discuss] A rant

[Reginald Beardsley]

I have been ignoring this torrent of BS as patiently as I can, but I'm really getting tired of it.

First of all, computing has a 75 year old history. There have been many false starts and mistakes along the way. The failure of the new arrivals to learn from the past results in the same mistakes being endlessly repeated.

I shall cite a single example from 30 years ago, hard coded filenames. Motif came out with the name of the keyboard configuration file hard coded "/etc/keysym.db" IIRC. A the time it was my job to compile and distribute X11 and Motif binaries on all company research lab systems that did not have vendor support for X11 and Motif. 

This is a common mistake made frequently before the IBM 360 series appeared and led to "sysin=" and "sysout=" in JCL for the 360 series (That may not be the exactly correct syntax, but this does not merit my going into my library to check). But the "genius" who wrote the Motif code could not be bothered with the past so he repeated the mistake.

No one here "hates" Linux, BSD, Windows or any other OS. We don't like various operating systems for a variety of legitimate reasons which vary by task to be accomplished, OS and individual.

Please read the original Bell Labs Unix papers before you subject us to more of this. Linux has veered so far from the original principles as to be completely unrecognizable. In any given day I may use Hipster/OI, Solaris 10 u8, Debian 9.3 or Windows. And I might well spin up Plan 9 or some other operating systems by inserting the appropriate disk in the machine. In short, I can crush someone with your attitude in minutes even if they have a PhD. And have done it more than once.

At such time as you can write intelligently describing the differences in implementation and philosophy about MVS (and its predecessors) , VM/CMS, VMS, RSX, Genix, Multics, Perkin-Elmer 3200 OS and a few others you will have some credibility with me. But until then you are just some child screaming that they will "hold there breath until they turn blue". I am quite certain I am not the only one *very* tired of it. I know the names of most of the people who have been replying to you and have the utmost respect for all but perhaps a few. Possibly all, as I've not paid close attention to who replied. The list is generally pretty quiet except for an occasional nut job.

If you have many years professional experience as a senior member of staff in large system environments you care about what seems minutiae to novices. We care because we either got bit or had to clean up after someone else got bit. Most of the people on this list have been involved in large system environments for longer than you have been alive.

It is certainly true that the organization of the filesystem in Illumos et al is a bit of a mess. This is true in every extant OS. IRIX, CLIX, HP-UX, Ultrix and a dozen other *nix systems I've used are long extinct. One of the great problems during the workstation wars was dealing with all the conflicting paths and file names. With xterms open on 6 or more different systems using a common NFS mounted home directory I had a very elaborate system for hiding the variations so I could work efficiently despite the variations. I supported software, both proprietary and GNU packages across all of them.

Please reply to /dev/null.

Reg
     On Thursday, January 28, 2021, 09:31:12 PM CST, 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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