[rescue] Re: G5 case

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Frank Van Damme wrote:

> On Wednesday 25 June 2003 04:18, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> > There's a huge one.  Linux is just a kernel; the userland comes from
> > a few hundred different sources, and it shows.
>
> Ah, trolling again a bit eh.

I don't stoop to trolling.  I try not to make comments about operating
systems I haven't run.  I've used Linux for over 7 years and think I
have quite enough personal experience behind any comments I make about
it.

Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean that they have a
baseless opinion.

> Most of the essential userland comes from the Gnu project, which is one
> source. And now if you'd care to explain the "it shows" part

Try reading the man pages for the kernel-module routines, then for some
of the GNU shit.  Oh, that's right, GNU has deprecated man pages, so
they have info pages.  And half of the installed software deposits its
documentation in /usr/doc, using neither man pages nor info pages.  At
any rate, if it's possible to find information on two separate pieces of
software in the same place, compare them.  Totally different
documentation style.  The pages don't cross-reference correctly.  The
environment DOES NOT ACT like a single OS.  It acts like a kernel with a
bunch of third-party software stapled on.

Now, compare that to Solaris, IRIX, AIX, or one of the BSDs.  The man
pages are all written (or rewritten) with the intent of you using the
set of tools in the distribution as an environment.  Pay special
attention to the cross-references.  The vendor -knows- what software
you'll have installed, so all the appropriate cross-references are made.
Contrast that with GNU gFooBar or whatever.  The maintainer doesn't also
know that you might have GNU gBarBaz installed, which complement each
other.  If you don't know that, you'll have no hope of gleaning that
from the documentation.

Oh, and how about command arguments?  Since most of the tools that ship
with a commercial unix or BSD come from the same place, most of the
tools that take similar parameters have the same arguments.  For
example, -f almost -ALWAYS- means "file for input or output".  For the
most part, Linux distributions tend to have some amount of this
cohesion...right up to the point of long parameters.  So you have
--input-file= for one tool, and --file= for another and --source= for
another.

The system just isn't very polished.  It's a collection of very
well-written tools that don't behave like a single product.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke   )  "Leave your lawsuits at home.  I have guns."
Elgin, TX          (                      --"Kountry" Mike Lundgren