21 Feb
2017
21 Feb
'17
5:25 a.m.
I was responding to the comment about the stability of Linux for
product delivery.
Having a car with a transmission that works perfectly is of little
benefit if the engine and tires keep blowing up.
Linus does take responsibility for the kernel, and that is good. But
nobody seems to take responsibility
for the other stuff, and that causes a ton of problems.
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry McVoy" <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
To:"Steve Johnson" <scj(a)yaccman.com>
Cc:"Larry McVoy" <lm(a)mcvoy.com>, "Joerg Schilling"
<schily(a)schily.net>, <tuhs(a)minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:Mon, 20 Feb 2017 15:18:42 -0800
Subject:Re: [TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other
I don't see how it is far to lay the userland issues at the feet of
Linus, he does the kernel. He's bitched about the same GCC issues
as you are.
And window managers? What does that have to do with Linus?
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 03:16:14PM -0800, Steve Johnson wrote:
I too have worked with Linus, and agree with the good
programmer
and
good architect.
I think he managed the project well for quite a while, but never
quite
recovered from the
GNU incursions.
As far as stability and portability is concerned, GNU is a
disaster.??
Even when a feature is
the same across different architectures the option names and values
are often different.
In one company I worked for we had two releases nearly derailed
because of Linux/GCC
issues.?? In one case, the way locales worked was different between
different versions of
Linux.?? In another case, GCC simply silently removed an option
that
we depended on and we
nearly shipped a product that would have bombed out if the user had
already upgraded
to the newest GCC.
In terms of following the Unix philosophy, the widow managers on
Linux
are getting more
bizarre by the year.?? Hitting a key at random by mistake can cause
windows to disappear,
screens of unknown utility to appear, everything to disappear,
etc.??
Setting options to try to
achieve some kind of consistency is totally different in each
system.?? Etc. etc.???? There seems
to be no larger organizing principle at work...
----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry McVoy" <lm(a)mcvoy.com>
To:"Joerg Schilling" <schily(a)schily.net>
Cc:<tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:Mon, 20 Feb 2017 14:24:57 -0800
Subject:Re: [TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other
Oh brother.
On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 07:14:44PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
can't
Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
> Linus had the qualities of being a good programmer, a good
architect,
> and a good manager. I've never seen all
3 in a person before or
since.
My memory is different. He claims that his intention is to keep
kernel/userspace interfaces stable, but given the fact that this
did never
happen, I tend to believe that he lacks the
understanding on what
all is part
of the kernel/userspace interface.
So you're taking on the guy who won the Unix wars, has stayed in
charge for
a couple of decades, created the OS that runs on 498 of 500 super
computers,
the OS that runs on more phones than apple's phones, tablets, and
computers
combined?
I've worked with Linus, I know him pretty well. I stand by my
description
above and nothing you've said has changed (and isn't likely to).
As for interfaces, huh. I've got two decades of supporting a
commercial
product that uses file system, networking, VM interfaces and I remember a time were we had to change something
because Linux broke
an API.
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm