On Tue, 13 Jun 2000 James Sutherland <jas88@cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> In some respects, perhaps, but unlike the Unix problems, Linux still has
> the same kernel and most of the same utilities, libraries etc.
Just about every distribution ships a non-Linus kernel, so the end user
is not necessarily running the same kernel. Some of those patches
require different utilities, some distributions take forever to upgrade
to the new libc library, let alone any other library...
> Indeed. One of the biggest problems with Unix was the way vendor
> versions exploded, with lots of different licensing fees and
> agreements, so every version came with different libraries, desktop
> environments, compilers...
You mean how some distributions ship with non-GPL'd software, and some
are based on libc5 and some on libc6 and some on 6.1, some come with
GNOME and some come with KDE and some come with CDE, and some come with
gcc-2.7.2.3 and some with pgcc and some with egcs and some with
gcc-2.95.2?
Some people claim that LSB is the answer to this, but last I heard the
LSB consisted of representatives of different distributions coming
together and being told by the Redhat folks "you will do it our way" and
everybody doing the right thing and leaving in disgust.
I bet this is the same thing that happened 20 years ago. The lesson not
learned is doomed to repeat itself?
Anyway, my 2c on the reiserfs thing, the main argument seems to be that
some people who haven't used it and some who have claim its not ready,
the developers and others who have/do use it claim it is, I thought
there was an EXPERIMENTAL tag in the config for these sorts of things so
those who wanted could use them and those who didn't don't even get to
see it by default? Then with the extra feedback the outstanding issues
(if any) could be resolved? Hell, even ext2fs has bugs that are still
being fixed - maybe for the same argument of not including reiserfs
ext2fs should be removed, and people who need it can download it as a
separate patch from sct's ftp site until all the outstanding issues with
ext2fs have been resolved? Sounds fair and reasonable to me. Many
people have to download all sorts of other separate patches (raid, alsa,
nvidia dri, 3dfx, working tulip drivers, etc.), what's one more?
<paranoid mode>
Or do we have one set of rules for AC's friends and coworkers submitting
patches, and another set of rules for everyone else?
</paranoid mode>
I agree that Hans Reiser may have made a bit of an ass of himself on
this list, but Theo de Raadt had similar problems with the BSD core and
I don't think it reflects on his code either. Plus Hans is only one of
many people working on reiserfs. If patches that are WIP (eg, on the VM
subsystem) can get in, why not patches that are far more advanced?
Again, mark it EXPERIMENTAL. The only reason I can see for not doing so
is political, not technical, based.
I (like other subscribers) look forward to the joint contributions
everyone involved in journaling filesystem support will make after they
fight it out (er, sort it out :) at that conference thingy. United we
stand, divided we fall.
-- Matt PS: I can't write short emails. Sorry.- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 15 2000 - 21:00:27 EST