Date: Thu, 17 Aug 1995 12:37:50 -0400 (EDT) From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@Glue.umd.edu> To: Jim Howard <jiho@sierra.net> Cc: freebsd-questions@freefall.FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: gnumalloc Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.950817123007.3635A-100000@espresso.eng.umd.edu> In-Reply-To: <199508162205.AA01418@diamond.sierra.net>
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On Wed, 16 Aug 1995, Jim Howard wrote: > > I don't think you have the whole story, and I believe you might possibly > > be wrong about this administrator versus user mindset. One of the big > > reasons why you want stuff in the root partition to be statically linked > > is so that, in the situation where you've blown away something drastic in > > /usr, and can't mount it (and all of your shared libs), the tools that > > exist to allow you to (possibly) fix this still work. If everything is > > made dynamically linked, and you lose your libs, you're dead. If fact, I > > don't think you can even update your libs easily, because when you move > > them, every tool you have will die. > > But your rebuttal just provides another example of the point. In the > single-user desktop PC world, if things get THAT fouled up you just > re-install the whole system from scratch, with important files presumably > backed up securely. Your argument would be considered somewhere > pretty far out on the fringe, frankly. But even accepting it, why would > anyone consider putting /usr on a separately-mounted partition on any > machine except a server? What purpose is served [ ;) ] for a single-user > desktop machine? > > And how did this degenerate into an argument, anyway? Your > perspective is clearly different from mine. > > It still amazes me that, although most UNI* machines are single-user > workstations, it doesn't occur to people to reconsider the notion that > workstations should carry all the baggage that only multi-user servers > actually require. This one-size-fits-all approach has limited the > appeal of UNI*. (The hardware margins of workstation vendors, > however, have attracted a fair amount of envy in the PC clone market, > where everyone is counting on Windows 95 to prop things up.) Maybe I don't fit into your view of the types of people who run desktop PCs. Certainly most FreeBSD users are _far_ more aware of how their machines work that Joe Average PC user, who vaguely understands what a file is. That doesn't make me a genius (anyone who knows me, knows I'm not at that high a level with FreeBSD yet), it just makes me someone who enjoys being more in control of my tools. Certainly I would never consider dumping my disk because some technical mistake means that I have to make a 30 minute sojourn amongst my books. I don't think this makes me very different than most FreeBSD hackers, does it? I really don't want to 'dumb down', and would probably drop this OS if that became a major goal. Personally, I think there's very little chance of that happening. If this means that we'll never be as large a group as Windoze users, I can live with that, I've never been all that keen on running with the herd. Have you? > > And since this all started with the memory usage of X and its clients: > How many sites do you know of, where the network transparency of X is > actually utilized as originally designed? What happened to the X terminal > market? > > I thought the newsgroups had been abandoned to arguments like > this.... > ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Chuck Robey | Interests include any kind of voice or data chuckr@eng.umd.edu | communications topic, C programming, and Unix. 9120 Edmonston Ct #302 | Greenbelt, MD 20770 | I run Journey2 (Freebsd 2.0.5-snap-0726) and (301) 220-2114 | n3lxx (FreeBSD 2.0.5-snap-0622) -- Great! ----------------------------+-----------------------------------------------
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