[Info-vax] CRTL and RMS vs SSIO

[chris]

On 10/14/21 01:29, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:

>
> There are no such things as “power grabs” in Free software. You are Free to choose,

Perhaps,  but the amount of money and effort that Red Hat (now owned
by IBM btw) put into Linux means they have disproportionate amount of
influence in the direction of the project. They are not the only
ones, but once big business get involved, then commercial interests,
rather than pursuit of excellence, will will always take precedence.

> Myself, I have found that systemd makes many things easier to do. For example,

writing a .service file is a lot easier than creating an entire init script.
>
Well, you are free to choose. I can understand the initial motivation
for systemd, in terms of orderly system service and process startup,
just think the approach was wrong. With Solaris the layered svcs
and svcadm framework uses XML files, but the underlying
structure of /etc files remains the same, which provides far more
choice in management terms and is more help if there is a system
crash. I know this subject has been debated to death and good for
Debian to provide both, just don't want systemd anywhere near
systems here, as it violates so much in terms of partitioning and design 
elegance. Could never respect such a crock of rubbish. Good
design is lightweight, whereas Linux is starting to sink under the
weight of it's own complexity.

>
> Here’s one fun thing: text-based logfiles have their timestamps in the “system” timezone, which is a pretty nebulous concept on a *nix system. (Consider someone remoting from one part of the world, into a server in a different part, in response to a customer problem report originating in yet another part, logged in their local timezone.) The systemd journal records everything in UTC, and you can easily display entries in any timezone, just by setting “TZ=«timezone»” at the front of the command.
>

All machines here are set to UTC, so the point is ?.

>> Linux is far too bloated and all things to all men these days, rather than a
>> technically efficient OS.
>
> I don’t why you say that, when it has always been possible to build custom kernels that include only the features that you need. Remember, it runs happily on something as low-powered as the Raspberry π.
>

Well, do occasionally rebuild kernels, but an OS is here primarily to
enable productive work, not spend all day configuring or debugging it.

>
> Seems like their development is mainly dominated by one company these days, with perhaps a less-than-admirable attitude to code quality and security<https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-license-violations-and-bad-code-freebsd-13s-close-call/>  ...Not

Not at all. Try reading the whole article, rather than cherry
picking :-). Had you done so, you would realise that the company
and individual concerned have been dropped from the project.

The fact that FreeBSD is embedded in so much commercial network kit,
also used by Apple OSX in the past, speaks volumes. Designed by
engineers, for engineers :-)...

Chris