Re: Unhappy campers Linux Inside
[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

Re: Unhappy campers

 
 Andy Tanenbaum writes:
 > >Where is the sizeable group of people that want to evolve gcc in a way that
 > >rms/FSF does not approve of?
 > A compiler is not something people have much emotional attachment to.  If
 > the language to be compiled is a given (e.g., an ANSI standard), there isn't
 > much room for people to invent new features.  An operating system has unlimited
 > opportunity for people to implement their own favorite features. 
 
 Try posting an announcement in one of the gnu groups about porting FSF software
 to the Macintosh... ;-)
 
 People will be emotional about anything they make, and more so if others try to
 do unexpected things with it. Software is no exception.
 
 If I remeber well, the only real attempt at global coordination of Minix projects
 has been Glen Overby's Projects directory at plains. Problem is that usually
 people don't want to announce all of their projects, because they are not sure
 about whether or when they will finish it.
   Fred was ready, and he told me he even set up big plans for only sending
 out his stuff to people who could prove they owned an original. PH was sceptical
 about his ability to check this, and their ability to check Fred. They were even
 less enthausiastic about his using the name "Minix" in the name of the final
 product. sigh.
   I've seen some of his code. Too bad he only works on PCs. Some of the ideas
 and comments floating around in the course of the current discussion were
 fixed by Fred; centralized system call server, dynamically added servers
 who can then serve new system calls. He ran TCP/IP as an added server.
   Sure, Fred has an unusual personality, and sometimes an attitude that
 smells of simply liking to run into a brick wall (not literally, please),
 but he is one hell of a programmer, and when he was still unemployed he
 had just the dynamism needed to get a large Minix rework done. I'ld
 allmost feel sorry for the fact that he has a job now. ;-)
 
 
 Perhaps we can use all this shouting and selfreflecting caused by the
 Linux wars to some good end. Glen Overby had the right idea in setting up
 a central site for collecting project info and ideas. What actually is
 needed is someone to volunteer maintaining such a database. Just saying
 "dump it here" will only transform anarchy to organized anarchy.
   Also portability of patches is currently far from ideal. As the recent
 sighup/init/getty activity shows, we have several packages, some of
 which are PC only, while others are ST only, and again others have simply
 never been tested on a wider range of machines.
 
 We have for the FS:
 	- symbolic links, multi-threading
 For mm:
 	- ??
 kernel:
 	- virtual consoles (standard on ST, addon on PC), sighup,
 	  the kub scheduler
 tools:
 	- new init, boot packages, shoelace
 lib:
 	- ??
 commands:
 	- zillions of programs
 
   I would like to suggest to those that built a patch set, to try and
 collect as much as possible info on portability, interference with other
 major patch sets, reliance on other major patch sets, and include this
 info with their patch sets. It would greatly help if an enthausiastic
 ST owner, having found a nice feature for his system, would not be
 (unpleasantly) surprised by the fact that the patch is only for PCs.
 Or vice versa of course.
 
 Greetings, Bert
 ---
 #include <std/disclaimer>
 
   Bert Laverman,  Dept. of Computing Science, Groningen University
   Friendly mail to: laverman@cs.rug.nl      The rest to: /dev/null
 
 
 
 -- 
 #include <std/disclaimer>
 
   Bert Laverman,  Dept. of Computing Science, Groningen University
   Friendly mail to: laverman@cs.rug.nl      The rest to: /dev/null