Brad Ideas - whofig - Comments

Alias?

Moz — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 22:04:41 -0700

Surely rather than rename (or as well as) you'd just want an "alias" command of some sort. Being able to say BlogFartz 4.9.2 is also SpellCheckMyBlog 2.4.0.27365 is probably only going to happen a few million times, so it is probably worth including.

But I admit that I'm a complete knucklehead on this stuff, I invariable spend much time cursing when I have to upgrade anything significant.

Kernel drivers

brad — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 12:36:54 -0800

I think making custom kernels is still considered a wizard thing in Linux. There are some automatic tools for certain drivers that will do all the work for you.

But even if the package is smart enough to compile with the headers of your current kernel, you need it against all kernels you run, and you need it to know that if I upgrade my kernel, I need to recompile all the special drivers for the new kernel -- which is a risky step because they probably have not been tested against that kernel, and the whole idea of a binary package is you're getting something that's been built and tested at least minimally against what it depends on.

I don't know what the plans are for the 2.8 linux kernel but a more modular driver architecture would be nice.

One aspect that I appreciate

Paul O — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 03:56:10 -0800

One aspect that I appreciate (at least theoretically; I run Debian Sid) about Ubuntu (and its K- and Edu- sisters) is the completeness of the system install: most users don't want to choose between the XFree86 and X.Org, for example. Let the advanced users worry about specialized configurations, rather than leaving it up to everyone to make each choice. And newer machines have enough disk space that installing a "complete" set of libraries and system tools isn't an issue.

If we were further willing to "version" those libraries (i.e. in the file tree, not just within the libraries), we might be able to let applications compile against newer libraries without affecting which version of each particular library other applications used. (And tracking the reverse links could allow an eventual trimming of the library versions. I'd like to see improved support for such capabilities in the file system, but that might cause additional problems, especially in the near term.)

As for kernel upgrades, I have never understood why the "default" binary driver packages didn't simply do the compile and install within the installation script, rather than making me execute such a script manually, line by line - often needing to consult pieces of multiple diverse sources where a script could determine the environment automatically.

Not an OS War issue

brad — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 15:57:54 -0800

I am not sure people would switch to VMS to fix this, unless it did what they need to do. Or Windows for that matter.

This is something that Linux and most other systems have to improve. Sysadmin cost is the highest cost of any OS, and the fact that linux is free-as-in-beer is really a pretty minor part of the cost equation right now.

To my mind, unless you do want to do a lot of things yourself, you need to pick a popular distribution. There is strength in numbers in any OS. With a popular distro (Ubuntu/debian, Fedora, SuSE) what you're going to get is a large body of people who have been through your problems, and already solved it. That's in part of what people like about the package systems -- on a big, popular distro, if there is some software you want, it is more likely to be in the package system so somebody has done the work of configuring and testing it on your system.

But we can do better.

One reason why I don't use Linux

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 06:02:08 -0800

This is one of the SEVERAL reasons I would never use
Linux, but prefer VMS. (VMS is free for non-commercial use;
for commercial use, it does cost money, but a) you get what
you pay for and b) it more than pays for itself since one needs
far fewer people to keep it running.) I have NEVER had to do
a fresh install. OS upgrades or patches are out-of-the-box.
It just works. I'm even running the latest version of VMS on
hardware which is 15 years old, and of course an executable
produced 15 or 20 years ago will still run on the most modern
hardware, with any version of the OS.

I'm fortunate to have a VMS day job, but I also have VMS at home.
No need to worry about viruses! True, it's not a popular virus
target, but even if targeted it is difficult or impossible to
write a virus.

Some folks might have used VMS several years ago and think it
is somewhat old-fashioned. Actually, it is still being developed
and was recently ported to Itanium hardware.