implemented features (Re: Decision time....)

[Freddie Cash]

On Monday 04 June 2007 01:45 am, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> If one views DragonFly as a pet research project of Matt, Simon and
> others, this is fine.  But if it is to be a serious alternative to
> FreeBSD or other systems, shouldn't there be some focus on near-term
> goals that are actually useful to regular users, rather than ambitious
> ideas like a brand-new filesystem?  It seems to me that SMP and 64-bit
> support should be the first priorities.

What's more important:
  - flashy, user-visible features that are rushed out in order to satisfy 
checkbox-ism, built on whatever shaky "foundation" can be hacked in right 
away, or
  - solid, workable, maintainable, solid foundation infrastructure that 
can later be used for all those flashy, user-visible features

This is the same complaint people have for KDE4 -- it looks the same as 
KDE3, so why would anyone switch, what have they been doing for the past 
two years?

The problem is that no one seems to want to look beneath the surface, to 
all the solid technologies and infrastructure that is being built (you 
know, the hard, valuable stuff).  Once that is all in place, then one can 
move on to the flashy stuff.  The difference is that the flashy stuff 
will be easy to do, will work correctly from the get-go, will be 
maintainable ... all because the developers took the time to make the 
foundations super-solid ahead of time.

Start at the bottom, and worm your way up.

Would you build a mansion by putting in the skylights first, using hacked 
together scaffolding to hold the skylight in place while others work on 
putting up walls, only to rip it all down again in order to put the 
foundation in??  Or would you lay a solid foundation, put up solid walls, 
add on a nice solid roof, and then put in the skylight?

> If DragonFly were usable to me, I would be able to contribute to some
> things -- pkgsrc, testing device drivers -- though not to kernel-level
> stuff.  But at this point, I can't even run DragonFly on a new
> computer without crippling myself.

Then don't.  No one is holding a gun to your head forcing you to use DFly 
for all your new systems.  :)  If it's not suitable for your tasks, then 
use something that is.  The right tool for the job, and all that.

-- 
Freddie Cash, LPIC-2 CCNT CCLP      Network Support Technician
School District 73                  (250) 377-HELP [377-4357]
fcash-ml at sd73.bc.ca