Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 22:51:54 +0100 From: "James Mansion" <james@wgold.demon.co.uk> To: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> Cc: Alexander Leidinger <Alexander@Leidinger.net>, Andrew Atrens <atrens@nortel.com>, small@freebsd.org Subject: RE: FreeBSD's embedded agenda Message-ID: <HCEPKPMCAJLDGJIBCLGHCEHFFGAA.james@wgold.demon.co.uk> In-Reply-To: <9822.1148656872@critter.freebsd.dk>
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>>'Good enough means exactly what it says, and doing more is foolish' > >I think you seriously lack historical perspective if that is your >considered opinion. No, I work in an industry where delay means opportunity cost, and we have to focus on getting to market before the market has moved on and margins reduce. FreeBSD has not done particularly well in this regard in the past, and my historical perspective is that I keep drifting away from FreeBSD because it periodically has its head up its arse trying to 'get it right' while the world just gets on with things. I'm just a user. I don't care about FreeBSD - its just an operating system, and there are plenty to choose from that are affordable and entirely adequate. The point I would like to make is that to be useful, an OS has to run the programs I want to run, on the hardware I have - and do it today. There's no point trying to create the best possible solution to the problems I'm solving today, because by the time you've done it: a) I'll have changed to using something else and b) the problems will have changed by then too. To a user with a job to do, being timely and relevant is often much more important than ultimate, eventual, elegance. I accept that from a creative perspective such mundane practicality is not artistically satisfying. As a practical example, I have a Via 600MHz fanless box here, with a CF reader that looks like an IDE disk drive. I have a project in mind to replace my current central heating control system with it: one of my objectives is that the current system (which uses an old HP Vectra running SuSE) tends to get unhappy after power cuts, and the disk is noisy - I'd like to fix that. So I figured I'd reuse an old 16MB CF card from a camera after we upgraded to a much bigger card. And I thought about it for a while and I've tried a few small system configurations with Linux and NetBSD and FreeBSD. But you know what? While I was doing that the price of a 2GB card fell to around the cost of my return fair to work every day. I'd still like to fit a solution on that 16MG card, but only for bragging rights. But making it so small isn't the 'best' solution. Its a stupid conceit, an end in itself. I couldnt even share it with others in practice because such small CF cards are obsolete and now virtually unobtainable. In practice I should just roll PC-BSD onto a bigger drive, KDE and all, set readonly root, and move on. Please do explain what you mean, anyway. Preferably without being condescending. James
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