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

[Dave McGuire]

On 12/18/2016 05:33 PM, Mouse wrote:
>> 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.

  I can't disagree on any of those points.  However, the real-world
situation with Linux isn't quite so bleak.  This is evident by the
simple fact that, in a great many applications, including the sending of
this email, it works.

>> 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.

  Mine just works.  All day, every day.  My phone and several tablets.
I reboot a couple of times per year to install OS updates, but that's
it.  How do yours fail?

  Not liking the way something is designed is very different from
thinking it doesn't or cannot do its job.  I've known you for enough
years to believe you would not confuse the two.

               -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA