On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 1:22 PM, Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote: > On 07/09/2014 01:31 PM, Les Mikesell wrote: >> I'm not convinced that being open and receptive to changes from people >> that aren't using and appear to not even like the existing, working >> system is better than having a single community, all running the same >> system because they already like it, and focusing on improving it >> while keeping things they like and are currently using. > > I think you and I remember a different set of lists. I remember lots of > griping about changes being forced down throats. Heh, a quick perusal > of one of the lists' archives just a minute ago confirmed my recollection. No, that is exactly my point. Back then the griping by affected active users happened in more or less real time compared to the changes being done. Now fedora goes off on its own merry way for years before its breakage comes back to haunt the people that wanted stability. >> With the latter approach, there was a much better sense of the cost of >> breaking things that previously worked. > Do you remember the brouhaha over libc5 that 'just worked' versus the > 'changed for no reason' glibc2? And don't get me started on the > recollections over the GNOME 1 to 2 upgrade (or fvwm to GNOME, for that > matter!), or the various KDE upgrades (and the entire lack of KDE for > RHL 5.x due to the odd license for Qt, remember? Don't think people running a bunch of RH5 servers really cared about X or desktops at all... > And then > all the i18n changes for 8.0 (I dealt with that one directly, since the > PostgreSQL ANSI C default had to be changed to whatever was now > localized.... That one was sort of inevitable. Likewise for grub2 and UEFI... > The bad rep for x.0 releases > started somewhere, remember? Well, that was the equivalent of fedora. You don't use that in production. The x.2 release mapped pretty well to 'enterprise'' - except maybe for 8.x and 9 which never really were very good. > Not that I necessarily disagree with your observations, by the way. I'm > just looking at the brushstrokes of the really big picture and > remembering how at the time it seemed like we sometimes were just moving > from one kluge to another (if you insist on the alternate spelling > 'kludge' feel free to use it.....). But it was a blast being there and > watching this thing called Linux find its wings, no? In these observations you have to take into account just how badly broken the base code was back then. Wade through some old changelogs if you disagree. There were real reasons that things had to change. But by, say, CentOS5 or so we had systems that would run indefinitely we a few security updates now and then. (Actually CentOS3 was pretty solid, but you have to follow the kernel). > And I have two previous versions of CentOS to fall back on while I learn > the new tools; I have both C5 and C6 in production, and have plenty of > time in which to do a proper analysis on the best way ('best way' of > course being subjective; there is no such thing as an entirely objective > 'best way') for me to leverage the new tools. The fact of the matter is > that Red Hat would not bet the farm on systemd without substantial > buy-in from a large number of people. The further fact the Debian and > others have come to the same conclusion speaks volumes, whether any > given person thinks it stupid or not. And I don't have enough data to > know whether it's going to work for me or not; I'm definitely not going > to knee-jerk about it, though. I'm never against adding new options and features. But I am very aware of the cost of not making the new version backwards compatible with anything the old version would have handled. And I'm rarely convinced that someone who doesn't consider backwards compatibility as a first priority is going to do so later either, so you are likely wasting your time learning to work with today's version since tomorrows will break what you just did. > But the rumors of something 'killing' Linux have and will always be > exaggerated. Systemd certainly isn't going to, if gcc 2.96 didn't. I > mean, think about it: the first rev out of gcc 2.96 wouldn't even > compile the Linux kernel, IIRC! Yes, but on the other hand, people still pay large sums of money for other operating systems. And there are some reasons for that. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com