At date and time Fri, 29 May 2015 11:09:08 -0500, J. Lewis Muir wrote: > On 5/29/15 5:22 AM, David Holland wrote: > > Because of these trends, I've been thinking for a while now that maybe > > it's getting to be time to fork. > > Hello, David! > > I started using NetBSD because of its small base system disk and memory > footprint, focus on security, support for many machine architectures, > ability to scale well to large SMP machines, support for a wide range > of deployments from embedded to server to desktop (it's a big time > savings to only have to learn and remember how to do something on one > OS instead of many), and genteel user and developer community. I value > all of these things. (Some benefits I came to appreciate later were its > relatively long support for a release and its package management system, > pkgsrc (writing a package once and having it work on all platforms I use > is a big win).)
[...] I sometimes think developers get so close they can't see the wood for the trees. They see all the flaws but fail to see the overall picture. As someone who struggles to understand code I am happily oblivious of NetBSD's flaws. What I can say, however, is that using NetBSD is so much more pleasant than using any of the modern Linux distributions, with the honourable exception of Crux and Slackware. I tried the latest Debian and CentOS recently and I wanted to throw up. Talk about over-engineering, deliberate obfuscation and condescension! It would be a tragedy of immense proportions to see NetBSD's small developer pool split up to pursue their own interests in yet another BSD fork. They have put together a first-rate, unequalled operating system that really is a pleasure to use. I for one didn't need marketing in order to find NetBSD; the sheer stupidity of other open-source operating systems was enough to drive me here. Why the need for marketing? We are intelligent enough to discover NetBSD for ourselves without marketing. If it does what we want then we stay with it. Simple. Is it really worth it putting the future of the project at risk over these small quarrels that pop up every now and again? Perhaps Ryota Ozaki could quantify the cost of maintaining this code? If it appears too costly then should we really go all out to maintain it, given what Ryota is offering in its stead - a multiprocessor-friendly network stack? Surely the pros have to be weighed up here, as well as the cons? Just my tuppence worth. NetBSD is to my mind nearly perfect. Adding a modern network stack, a modern filesystem and perhaps some MAC implementation (or do we already have that?) would make it unequalled. If we need to sacrifice some code along the way shouldn't we be prepared to do so? People will naturally gravitate towards excellence if it is provided, no marketing required. Let's keep the developer pool together, and let's not get all worked up over code if Ryota feels a multiprocessor network stack can't be easily achieved while it's in place. The pursuit of excellence is not always immediately rewarding, and some people stand to lose out for the greater good. That's life. No need for drama; let's make a mature decision about this and be grateful we still have NetBSD to work and play with, because, for me at least, 95% of the alternatives are rapidly heading for the gutter. -- Gerard Lally