Subject: Re: /opt (NOT!)

From: [email-masked] (L. Todd Masco)

In article <Pine.SUN.3.90.940909073357.26903D-100000@xochi>,
Charles Ewen MacMillan <[email-masked]> wrote:
>  I feel very much the same about init levels and the like. BSD is
>  not an effort to make a free SVr4, BSD is its own universe, and we
>  should not look for SVr4 in it, nor see it where it is not.

I'm sorry, but this is extremely dopey.  In other words, you'll
turn your nose up at a new feature that costs you nothing because
it's too "SVr4"ish.   Do you have the slightest idea of how init
levels work?  Do you *like* installation processes that involve
editting your only rc.local?

Look, having two divergent flavors of UNIX is a *bad* *thing*.  The
best we can do to address this problem is to allow and encourage
cross-pollination between SV and BSD;  It's already started with SVR4,
including BSD sockets and the like, as well as the increasing use of
BSD remote printing protocols.  Why dig in our heels and whine, "ewww,
no, we can't have any _changes_"?  If so, you would be totally without
features like record locking, clean bits on filesystems (and filesystems
with much tighter limits, too!), amd file descriptor passing

One of my professions is sysadmin, too, and you know what?  I transitioned
an entire running production network from SunOS 4 to SunOS 5 in the last
year.  If you're at all competent, it's an easy task -- not trivial, but
easy.  SVR4 is by far the most BSDish of the UNIces about, thanks largely
to Sun.  They took a lot of good ideas and put 'em to work in SVR4 because
they worked and addressed real problems, added real functionality.

We'd be stupid not to do the same.

Fighting improvements just for the sake of resisting change is a worthless
stance: Have you decided not to upgrade sendmail to 8.6.9 on your systems? 
If you're on the Internet, have you fought having a firewall?  Have you 
ignored the bug in fgets() that the Morris Worm took advantage of?  Do
you still have world readable encrypted passwords in /etc/passwd?
Have you avoided upgrading your shells to ones that don't have the
"use setuid root scripts to get root" design misfeature?  Do you still
demand a sprintf() that returns char *?  

If the answer to any of these questions is "yes" (which would be
consistent with the view you espouse above), then you deserve what
you get.

Sorry for the flame and rant, but I'm really tired of anti-SV bigots.

For those interested:

I hope to have something that's at least a first start at providing
run-level rc scripts in the next week or so.  If people are happy with
it, we can push it to the main NetBSD folks following that.
-- 
L. Todd Masco  | "Hide, witch, hide!  The good folk come to burn thee, their
[email-masked]  |  keen enjoyment hid behind a gothic mask of duty." -JS/BATE