[rescue] Linux wet paint, was Re: Spark10 CPU question (must fix - SPARC damnit :-) )

[Mouse]

> From my own perspective, [Linux] really has grown up a lot.  I've
> always been a commercial UNIX (and VMS) guy, both personally and
> professionally, and I've looked down my nose at Linux.  I've played
> with it, and thought "Hmm, nice toy".

I agree with those stances.  Still.

> But now I depend on it to get real, critical-for-food work done.  It
> has grown up a lot.

Those two sentences are almost unrelated, from my point of view.  Lots
of people do food-on-the-table work with utter crap code.  And even the
second sentence doesn't mean much; maybe it's grown up a lot, but (a)
it's still way short of grown up, and (b) it's grown a lot more in some
directions than others, and it's still horribly, horribly immature in
some of those dimensions.

I have grown used to Linux exhibiting bugs - all the way from the
detailed code level up to the design level - that I would be embarassed
to produce in a student homework assignment, never mind in code being
shipped to millions of users.  And not only do people produce such work
and seriously propose it for inclusion, many distros actually accept
it, thereby demonstrating not only severe lack of judgement but an a
near-total nonexistence of QA.

The poster child at the moment for this phenomenon is, of course,
systemd, but that is just the best-known and perhaps worst recent
example of an endemic and longstanding phenomenon.

And, while I haven't actively gone looking for exceptions (Linux is
unsuitable for my own use for so many other reasons already), I deal
with various Linux distros at work, and I have yet to encounter one
with documentation I wouldn't be embarassed to admit to shipping.

And, yes, I work with Linux...well, not quite daily, but certainly
multiple days each week; these are not opinions formed once and carried
forward with no ongoing basis.

> And Android is just fantastic and generally just WORKS, 'nuff said.

As someone who once spent months trying to add stuff to Android (as a
developer for someone coming out with a new phone), I disagree.  (Well,
okay, I'll agree with "fantastic", though I mean by it something rather
different from what you presumably do.)  It's a huge crawling horror
pitched over the fence with no real documentation.

/~\ The ASCII				  Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML		mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B