Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 15:57:13 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Anthony Atkielski <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Why dual boot? Message-ID: <3C534259.A20067B2@mindspring.com> References: <3C4FBE5C.2AE8C65@mindspring.com> <20020123114658.A514@lpt.ens.fr> <20020123223104.SM01952@there> <3C4FBE5C.2AE8C65@mindspring.com> <4.3.2.7.2.20020124213809.00e6e5d0@localhost> <20020125131659.GB7374@hades.hell.gr> <3C51CD33.4E69B204@mindspring.com> <001b01c1a635$636a4170$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C5270E4.BF21F79B@mindspring.com> <011b01c1a659$fb98a670$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C52AB34.B8896C8D@mindspring.com> <018c01c1a675$f3dcc1c0$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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Anthony Atkielski wrote: > Terry writes: > > Can you back this statement up? > > Only empirically. You mean anecdotally. Empirically would mean you had some conclusive evidence you could share. > > Complexity is an emergent property of even > > incredibly simple-seeming systems. > > But that's not what I said. I said that the more complex a system is, the > less stable it will tend to be. Can you back this statement up? Have you ever heard the words "metastable" or "fractal"? > This has nothing to do with whether or not > a seemingly simple system is in fact complex. I said it was an emergent property; this doesn't mean that "a seemingly simple system is in fact complex"; it means that complexity will appear, eventually if not immediately. The key to interacting with complexity is appropriate abstraction of that complexity along fractal lines. If we get back to the problem at hand, the partitioning of disks for the purposes of dual boot, then one of the very obvious places for abstraction is the fact that there are two partitioning tools in a self-similar domain, which is breaking up a disk into smaller areas for particular uses. So one obvious abstraction that can be had is to have a single tool that does the partitioning, and to treat the FreeBSD disk partition table exactly as you treat a DOS partition table within a DOS extended partition. This abstracts an entire layer of complexity from the process, by permitting the same tool UI to be used in the FreeBSD disklabel domain and the DOS partition table domain. Thus, while the system is still just as complex as it was before, the user experience is less complicated, and the attack phase of the learning curve is not as prolonged, since there is one less class of interaction that has to be learned by the user. > > Why you are for maintaining the status quo > > of monumental effort ... > > I'm not. It makes no difference to me, since I do not build dual-boot > systems. You don't act as if it makes no difference to you. You act as if you are heavily invested in the status quo. > > I guess this is OK for a developer ... > > It is okay for a production system or network, too. Your use of the phrase "production system" carries a lot of baggage with it; I'm not prepared to grant that the systems installed from CDROM are "production systems", unless you are a computer manufacturer who is shipping FreeBSD preinstalled as part of your system production line. If that were the case, I kownt hat you are not using the FreeBSD install process at all in production, and may not even be using it in the bootstrap process of producing a "golden master" disk. Having had personal experience with producing a "golden master" CDROM for embedded systems based on FreeBSD, I can say with authority that the FreeBSD CDROM production scripts are not up to the task because it's not possible to use kernel configs other than "GENERIC", and have sysinstall correctly install the resulting kernel, since it tries to copy "kernel.GENERIC", and will not look for the actual kernel if it is named "kerne.PROD" or anything other than "kernel.GENERIC". > Few systems operate in > isolation these days. Isolation or non-isolation is irrelevant to the problem, as far as it has been discussed. Isolation becomes an issue when network installation or upgrade are involved, and is therefore outside the scope of the discussion of CDROM installs entirely. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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