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Message-ID: <335B9284.6E78@westongold.com>
Date: Mon, 21 Apr 1997 17:15:00 +0100
From: James Mansion <james@westongold.com>
Organization: Westongold Ltd
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To: "M.R.Murphy" <mrm@Mole.ORG>
CC: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Price of FreeBSD (was On Holy Wars...)
References: <199704201506.IAA11828@meerkat.mole.org>
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M.R.Murphy wrote:
> 
> Are these comments from practice of experience or from theory of experience?

Largely from numerous sad experiences relying on version 1.0s in the
past.

I'm just a pissed off cynical old goat, and I like other people to do
the
bleeding. ;-)

I'm also very wary of the subtle nature of thread related bugs.  For
example,
a gentleman posted some code here that he claimed implemented fast
semaphores
and that had been stable for ages.  But it has fundamental race
conditions
in it.

So I'd look for a very long gestation and testing period, much as I
would
with a DBMS.

If you think about it, lots of people ran Solaris 2.x for a while, some
quite successfully, but for threaded and SMP use it was pretty awful
until
2.4 patch something or other.

And people ran various NT and W95 versions for a long time prior to
release, some very successfully, but that didn't make them perfect
either.

(Tell me about it.  Is WinCE 1.0 finished?  Like hell.  Pah.)

> 
> ;-)
> 
> --
> Mike Murphy  mrm@Mole.ORG  +1 619 598 5874
> Better is the enemy of Good

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