Date: Wed, 20 Mar 1996 05:38:14 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Dave Hayes <dave@kachina.jetcafe.org> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Adding a damn 2nd disk Message-ID: <14328.827329094@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 20 Mar 1996 02:38:18 PST." <199603201038.CAA25463@kachina.jetcafe.org>
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> >Because few people work with us to make it turnkey. > > Why is that? No idea. It's a boring and thankless task, perhaps? Like Joerg said, volunteers have this nasty habit of doing things because they WANT to and you can't force them to do differently unless you have some $$$ to throw their way. If you're keen to throw $$$ my way so that I can actually afford to do this someday, the full details on donations are given in http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/submitters.html > I await it too. Gee, if I understood it well enough to automate it, > I'd have done so, my server would be in it's previous state, and there > would have been no flame. But the tools don't work. Fdisk doesn't > work reliably. Without fdisk, disklabel seems worthless. I sincerely suggest commercial software in your case then. Clearly, you just don't "get it" about this free stuff and I can only point you at an organization like BSDI who is at least paid to try and fix your complaints in a timely fashion. Again, as I said quite directly in my first reply to you - the problems with fdisk and disklabel's interfaces are KNOWN. What is not known is who will fix them. You? Clearly not. Someone else? This increasingly ficticious someone else shows every sign of not coming forward, and no real surprise there since "someone else" gets assigned a lot of the shitty work around here! :-) > Unfortunately, there's a LOT to learn about this particular invocation > of BSD and why it does what it does. I'd much rather spend the time > seeing what it can do, and getting other companies interested in using > it. And I'd be more than happy to see you engage in such promotion. I'm well aware of the concept of "each to his or her own particular area of strength." However, you will have to learn to be a lot more patient with the areas of weakness if you want to hang out here and use this product without bringing angry denounciations down upon your head. More importantly, there is a style and a technique for coaxing volunteers into doing things which you clearly have to learn if you want to even raise certain topics with any hope of a positive result. Venting your spleen about some bug which mangled your system, killed your dog and drove your wife into the arms of the cable repairman may make you feel better for a time, but NO positive result will ensue and you will have done *nothing* to encourage a resolution of the problem - quite the opposite, most likely. It's a far more positive approach to ask instead how you might help to fix the problem, even if it's only to act as a focal point for ideas, or presenting your own ideas as to how you would like such a utility to look. This is not to say that certain people here don't occasionally fulminate at some problem and that people don't also sometimes jump sheepishly to fix it, but the equation there is slightly more complex. It's like money in the bank, you see. If you do something good for the project over a period of time, this is like making deposits towards the good will of its members. People who have moved mountains in the service of it can get away with quite a bit of fulmination because they've earned the respect of their peers and those peers want to fix whatever problem is aggrevating the other contributor so that they in turn can benefit from further contributions from him or her. You have no "money" in the bank yet and hence have no credit for such attacks of angst. This doesn't mean that you can't state your case, you most certainly can, simply that you have no right to state it forcefully since that will simply get you ignored as a flaming expletive who does not appreciate all the good work that the project HAS done. > If, however, they see experienced administrators struggle with adding > a 2nd disk (something that DOS can do in seconds, we all *like* UNIX > on this list right?), it doesn't look so good does it? No, naturally not. I'd love to see this fixed. I'd love to see someone with more time than me fix it. Since such people are in short supply, I *am* working towards a solution but it's going to take some time to get it right. > I guess I'm questioning priorities in an absence of any knowledge > about why. Losing an entire server because of a bug in sysinstall > tends to get some people to flame first, and ask questions later. If those people have little self-control, yes. Fortunately, most of our users are actually fairly intelligent about the "lack of warranty" implied by running free software and they're also more in control of their emotions. > I did. I just rebuilt my server, and acquired more experience with > sysinstall. That's something, isn't it? For you, yes. For those who follow in your footsteps, no. In point of fact, that's just about what everyone else who's encountered this bug has done, which shows reasonable attention to self-interest but very little to the community interest. The fallacy of this approach should be fairly obvious to you, considering that you just tripped over the same rock that none of the other sufferers ever bothered to move out of the way. > There's going to be a special desk on this planet where we'll -all- have > to be using someone else's idea of good interfaces if these kinds of For the last time, this is NOT our idea of a good interface! This is our idea of the interface we're stuck with until somebody has the time to re-write it. Jordan
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