[aklug] Re: multiple distros coordinate to establish /run directory

On Thu, 31 Mar 2011, Greg Madden wrote:

> Oh shoot, why not Linux becoming like Apple ? I have this really irrational
> dislike of MS ;-)

It's not irrational, I have very specific reasons why I don't like MS. I'm
not a big fan of Apple, either, but they're slightly less offensive.

> Ah, elitist technical jargon, once again. This is but a symptom, dev's create a
> nice OS and instead of sitting back, relaxing , getting a girl friend, enjoying
> life , they keep hacking away ...for no apparent reason. Next thing you know we
> have systemd, /run, KDE4, Gnome 3, all answers to questions NO ONE is asking ;-)

I think it's extremely naive, not to mention ignorant of history, to assume
that all change is for the better. Systemd violates fundamental principles
of UNIX system design which directly impacts robustness and diagnostic
clarity. Not to mention that they acknowledge failure modes for system
configurations that are very common and should have been designed for in the
first place. /run I don't have a huge issue with but it is indicative of
how these people are steering us wrong in the first place. It's a
concession to a symptom, not a solution to the disease, which is bad
software design.

You don't have to understand or agree, but you might want to study up on
UNIX architecture and software design before you dismiss this out of hand
too readily.

Perhaps a simple exercise might illustrate things more practically: for
those of you running dedicated *servers* I dare you to dump a list of every
package installed on your system and verify if each one present is directly
applicable to the administration, maintenance, or direct support of enabled
services and/or the core OS. If you tried to trim that list down I'm
willing to bet that you're going to find software that has no real benefit
but can't be removed without breaking other necessary software. Not
because it's being used, but because your binary packages are linked
against them for some minor, unused functionality, etc.

This is the mess that we're in, and it's accelerating. For people who
actually give a crap about security and robustness it makes it magnitudes
harder to maintain that level of compliance. Not to mention that with the
poorer quality of ancillary software in general you end up having to have
more scheduled downtime to apply patches with greater frequency. Kind of
like... Microsoft. Huh. Funny how that works.

You know where to shove your elitist comment, Greg. ;-)

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.
Received on Thu Mar 31 13:21:53 2011