>>>>> "jcm" == James C McPherson <james.mcpher...@oracle.com> writes: >>>>> "ga" == Günther Alka <a...@hfg-gmuend.de> writes:
jcm> I am amazed that you believe OpenSolaris binary distro has too
jcm> much desktop stuff. Most people I have come across are firmly
jcm> of the belief that it does not have enough.
minification is stupid, anyway. It causes way more harm than good. I
can understand not wanting to have weird flavour-of-the-month daemons
running until you've been bothered to learn what they do, but not
wanting to have their binaries on the disk is just silly. It's also
annoying when some sysadmin minifies away xauth so that 'ssh -Y'
doesn't work, or minifies away vi because he uses nano---his OCD
becomes unreasonable biggotry taking the place of building a workable
consensus platform, which is the proper task at hand when deciding
what to include and how to present it.
But it gets much worse when the minifiers start reaching into the
packages themselves and turning off options. Ex., they will turn off
the Perl/Python scripting support for some common package because they
want to yank out Perl and Python to make the distribution smaller. Or
they do not want to ship libX11.so, so they'll rebuild packages with X
support switched off. Once they've done that, if you actually need
those things, it will waste heaps more time to track down what went
wrong.
The existence of the knobs themselves is harmful enough, but the
popular demand of idiots for this kind of knob wastes the time of the
non-idiot packagers expected to provide it: they have to split the
result of a single build into twenty tiny interdependent subpackages,
shim dlopen() in there where it wasn't before (if it's a binary
package system), and then go back and test the whole monster: wherever
they drop the ball, you suffer, and while they're tossing the ball
around they're spending time pandering to the damned minifiers instead
of making and updating other packages which are actually useful to
sane people.
The insanity gets pushed further when whole packages start factoring
core pieces of functionality into ``modules'', so now in Eye of Gnome,
I have the ``double click on a picture to make it bigger Module.so''.
I guess, if I want to make my system smaller, I can use the packaging
system to remove the ability to double click on pictures and make them
bigger? What the fuck? The minification fetish has spread out both
directions from the packaging system and infected everything from the
architecture of the source code to the user-visible menu structure of
the app!
Minification zealotry should stick to systems running from NOR flash
like openwrt, or <1GB NAND systems like android. It's got no place on
a system with disks.
As a corrolary, any minification based on busting a binary into .so's
and then scattering the .so's into packages is stupid, because the
package systems where minification makes sense are source-based and
don't need that, in fact suffer from it because the split binaries
contain more symbols and are larger in core and larger on disk.
Just say no to minification if you're doing it because it ``feels''
right. Just knock it off. Go work on your car stereo, or develop
perverted rituals with your espresso machine, instead.
ga> i installed opensolaris and my first impression was very
ga> disappointing.
yeah. me, too: my first impression was ``the installer does not work
at all without X11. oh, and BTW X11 does not work at all without
nVidia haha, ENJOY.'' That was at least two years ago though.
ga> the gui was slow and not very intuitive and the only thing
ga> thats's running fine was the browser.
wtf, mate? You complain the install is not minimal, but then you
judge the overall system by the superficial impression its GUI makes?
ga> if someone will try it -its free.
Is it? I don't really understand the nexenta license, which is why I
don't bother with it. The opensolaris licensing is already confusing
because parts of it are binary, and 'pkg' makes it very easy to
install things with non-redistributable licenses, or extremely weird
things like SunPro compilers that claim to have different licenses
depending on what you use them for or how you define yourself as a
person and include automatic agreements not to publish unfavorable
benchmarks and other similar bullshit. It's admirable, important, and
surprising to me that Solaris has actually managed to become a
redistributable livecd with a modern package system (yeah, and where's
your darwin livecd, fanboy?), but still because of the ecosystem
opensolaris comes from you're constantly one enter key away from
encumbering your system.
If you want it to be free maybe use freebsd---then you still get ZFS
but you get away from some of the lazy assertions, most of the binary
disk drivers and mid-layers, and from the stupid legacy disk-labeling.
FreeBSD also has a scripted build process all the way from source tree
to .iso that you can run yourself. I've stuck with solaris so far
because I've got some sparc systems on which freebsd persistently runs
like shit, and want the latest ZFS, and want experience with something
other, and am interested in some of the other marketing pitches behind
solaris like crossbow, infiniband, good SMP support, pNFS & Lustre,
VirtualBox, and linux zones (thuogh at least this last pitch's
delivered feature is seemingly-stagnant and misleadingly unfinished).
It's disruptive for me to switch operating systems, even just every
five years, and I think some good projects so far have structure and
funding. Sun hired so many good BSD developers I'm looking for a
platform that's got realistic hope of mobilizing some money behind it
to feed developers and assure its future which Linux and Solaris have
more than FreeBSD does---their permissive license hasn't even brought
them the corporate interest they claimed it would relative to more
restrictive ones, much less the trickle-down putbacks their just-so
stories predicted. However the for-profit corporate world hasn't got
the reputation for long-view stability over decades that the free
Unixes do, and especially if FreeBSD would give up its MIPS fetish and
start working on an ARM port it could become interesting for ZFS fast,
so I really think both are worth a thought.
pgppx4jqFDvw1.pgp
Description: PGP signature
_______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
