From owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jan 14 02:33:30 2015 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix, from userid 1060) id 2E65CBC4; Wed, 14 Jan 2015 02:33:30 +0000 (UTC) Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2015 18:33:30 -0800 From: Craig Rodrigues To: Royce Williams Subject: Re: projects to better support FreeBSD sysadmins Message-ID: <20150114023330.GA80986@FreeBSD.org> References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.23 (2014-03-12) Cc: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org, Deb Goodkin X-BeenThere: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.18-1 Precedence: list List-Id: FreeBSD Evangelism List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 02:33:30 -0000 On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 02:14:24PM -0900, Royce Williams wrote: > At face value, the main project list is heavily weighted towards > relatively esoteric OS features. The Foundation list is heavily > weighted towards advocacy and communication (as it should be). Royce, Thank you for your post and your analysis. I agree with everything you wrote. My observation is that the FreeBSD developer community is heavily skewed towards kernel developers and systems developers. That's why the project list which you mentioned in the FreeBSD status report has a lot of items for kernel and OS features. However, FreeBSD has always been more than just a kernel. The project sells itself as a provider of a fully usable and integrated operating system. The kernel is only one component of a fully usable system. For a while, I worked for Jordan Hubbard at iXsystems, and when I talked with him, the sense I got is that in the early days of the project, the focus was much more on having a fully usable and integrated operating system than it is today. The early project founders were much more pragmatic about getting things done and having a usable system. They chose the BSD license for practicality, but were not afraid to use GNU things if there was no equivalently functional BSD licensed tool. The project was not just focused on adding esoteric OS and kernel features. For example, things like sysinstall, which tried to have a fully integrated menu for configuring the system, was a big deal in the early 1990's compared to the competition. Today, the state of the art has advanced, and sysinstall looks quite primitive, but the ideas for what it was trying to accomplish are valid. However, it was an attempt at improving usability. Unfortunately, in recent years, when Kris Moore tried to integrate newer installer work that he wrote, he was constantly pushed away because his code depends on 3rd party libraries such as Qt, which are not in the base system. Kris's work is very nice. I've used his installer in PC-BSD both in desktop and server modes. It's a shame that Kris did all this work and was basically told to get lost. The end result is that Kris had to go and form a separate PC-BSD project instead of being able to improve FreeBSD itself. The bsdinstall installer that we have today in the base system does work, but it actually *lacks* features in comparision to sysinstall which is a 1990's era tool!! Unfortunately, I think the project has lots its way and gone away from its roots in the areas of having a usable operating system and has veered towards esoteric OS and system features. I agree with you that refocusing Foundation efforts more towards improving usability would be a very good thing. -- Craig Rodrigues rodrigc@FreeBSD.org