On Mon, 29 May 2000, Khimenko Victor wrote:
> In <39323E5D.A32C1B2A@cyberport.com> Warren Young (tangent@cyberport.com) wrote:
>
> >> "pretty admin tools" is entirely a religious issue.
>
> > Um, okay. :) If you doubt that it matters, well, it's a good thing
> > you're not calling the shots.
>
> > What do you think would happen if Red Hat stopped including Emacs with
> > the distro? Let's say the top brass goes and decides vi is better. All
> > else being equal, their market share would probably drop to a _tenth_
> > what it is now, even though Emacs "only" accounts for roughly half the
> > market vis a vis vi. Why? Linux installed on a multiuser machine has
> > to make all those users happy. If half the users on the machine want
> > Emacs, they're gonna give this hypothetical Red Hat distro a miss.
>
> > The same applies to pretty admin tools.
>
> Huh ? How ??? You allow EVERY user to use "pretty admin tools" ? Are you even
> sane ? "Linux installed on a multiuser machine has to make all those
> users happy". Even if it's true (and it's not - see cite below) it does not
> issue for admin tools - they are for admins, not "all users" anyway.
(snip)
Indeed. If your users need admin tools, they aren't users any more :-)
> > As for binary interfaces stifling improvements, sorry, it isn't true.
> > All of SCO's kernel ABIs are versioned, which lets them change the
> > interfaces at will: old drivers can ask for and get the old interfaces
> > while newer drivers use the new interfaces. What this _does_ cause, and
> > I do mention it, is bloat and complexity: there are now eight different
> > versions of SCO's device driver interface, for example. I don't know if
> > UnixWare supports all eight still, but it does support several of them.
>
> Simple sample: in linux drivers all unneeded on locks in driver are nullified
> and on SMP they are inlined. You CAN NOT do this with binary interface.
The VxD linker in Windows '95 does inline/nullify some common and simple
calls, in fact. In general, though, you're right: this sort of
optimisation can only be done when you've got the source to both halves in
front of the compiler at once.
James.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 31 2000 - 21:00:21 EST