Date: Sat, 12 Jul 1997 18:36:28 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami) Cc: torstenb@ramsey.tb.9715.org, current@FreeBSD.ORG, hans@brandinnovators.com Subject: Re: Heads up and and a call for a show of hands. Message-ID: <16159.868757788@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 12 Jul 1997 16:42:27 PDT." <199707122342.QAA10120@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU>
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> Which systems have it? I don't find it on our Solaris box. Well, it's in Linux and NetBSD, at least. > Am I the only one that is disturbed by the recent trend of > behind-the-door negotiations with vendors followed by a commit > followed by a big controversy? It seems like the vendors were not There are no black helicopters here, Satoshi, and I wish you'd stop flinging that accusation around. What you've seen as behind-the-door commits in these two occasions (/var/mail and ld.so.conf) are not the result of some secret vendor cabal, plotting to steal your precious bodily fluids while you sleep, they're the result of *ME* getting what I felt to be a reasonable request and then setting out to make what seemed, again to _me_, a very minimal and reasonable change in order to better support such needs. On these two occasions, the subsequent flame wars which erupted were characterised more by their heat than by their light, and as I don't have a lot of time for highly emotional arguments which serve no reasonable purpose other than to piss all over some feature without proposing a reasonable, concrete solution to the same problem, or are driven by what seems to be some greater need to harp endlessly on some diversionary topic of convenience rather than spending the energy more constructively working on real (and harder) problems, I basically switched off it after a few days. I will repeat: There was no secret conspiracy to get the features in, simply what I felt to be a reasonable and very low-overhead commit followed by lots of flaming and me switching the topic off in disgust. So far, the anticipated rash of break-ins and security holes has not accompanied the "dreaded /var/mail change", nor do I think that the ld.so.conf mechanism (modulo a few changes, since I agree that vendor editing of /etc/ld.so.conf is sub-optimal and I've been _trying_ to address that issue) will result in all the fire and brimstone raining from the skies that you predict. It's truly a feature that, if you don't want to use it, lets life goes on _exactly_ as before and no additional complexity in anyone's /etc has to result from this unless they specifically desire it. I think this is Poul-Henning's bike shelter scenario again (what was the name of the law in question again?). Everybody wants to argue about a change which results in no functional changes whatsoever if you don't want them, but nobody wants to debate why (for example) we've had broken mechanisms like DEVFS or LFS lurking in the system for so long without either fixing them or throwing them away so that a competing effort would and could be encouraged. Bah. Let it also be understood that I'm perfectly willing to back this one out if it seems that there's true concensus against it, but so far _most_ people have tended to indicate that _modification_ of the idea is what's warranted, not tossing it out completely. Jordan
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