[OpenIndiana-discuss] Hipster 2020.10 text installer ISO Wow!!!!

[Reginald Beardsley]

Gad!

The BSD rc.d system is the epitome of the Unix tradition of "ease of discovery". The Sys V inittab was OK, but not as flexible. SMF was designed for very large system environments which no longer exist. And Sun had to grandfather both BSD and Sys V ISV installs which simply made it more complex. Systemd is just a reinvention of SMF motivated by the reality that Linux has displaced SunOS and there are very large Linux environments which need better management tools.

I wrote a *very* acerbic essay "You Must Be Root To Install" in response to having to deal with this stuff. And typeset Will Gray's Usenet post on the same subject.

In certain circles there is a popular quip, "Algol 60 was a significant improvement over its successors."

Big system environments are hard. I was very excited by Plan 9 and got a disk at Usenix '95. A complete bootable OS and windowing system with Unicode support, an editor and basic utilities on a single 1.44 MB floppy! The goal was to handle 35,000 users. I had the opportunity to discuss it with Dennis who informed me that the work to make it scale to that many users had not and was not likely to be done. Staff resources had been shifted to Inferno and set top boxes. :-(

Plan 9 does still exist and runs some very large machines that do things which are *very* secret. About all they will reveal is a photo of the cabinets in the machine room.

Reg

     On Tuesday, March 2, 2021, 09:36:30 PM CST, Chris <oidev at sunos.info> wrote:  
 
 On 2021-03-02 03:20, cretin1997 via openindiana-discuss wrote:
> 
> Another weakness of FreeBSD is the init system of it that has to be 
> mitigated by
> tools like daemontools.
No offense, but this is false.
> Some embrace the KISS principle praise it for it
> deterministic and simplicity. But when comparing with Solaris' SMF and FMA,
> FreeBSD's RC init system is a joke. That's real. FreeBSD's RC init system 
> loses to
> SystemD, too, even though they don't want to admit it.
This is purely opinion (yours). :-)
I know many, many people who flocked from Linux to FreeBSD when SystemD as
the only option became final. Those whom couldn't bear to leave Linux, went
to Slackware.

--Chris

-- 
~10yrs a FreeBSD maintainer of ~160 ports
~40yrs of UNIX

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