(someone else's quotes are scattered through here, my mailer lost the nested quoting) On Jun 18, 2007, at 16:46 , Creighton Hogg wrote:
There are lots of things to like about Linux. It doesn't cost money. It's fast. It's reliable. It's flexible. It's secure.
As someone who was involved with early Linux development but eventually bailed to FreeBSD for personal use, and who currently supports Linux in his day job, I'm somewhat dubious about "reliable" and "secure".
One vast tangled mess of complexity and disorder. Exhibit A: Package managers exist. Exhibit B: Autoconf exists. I rest my case.
Erm, package managers should exist regardless. That *multiple* incompatible package managers exist can be argued as a flaw. The real problem indicated by your exhibits (assuming the preceding adjustment) is that "Unix" is not a monolithic entity; it's the result of dozens of companies extending the original research OS in multiple incompatible directions, then multiple standards committees "harmonizing" them more or less by legitimizing every incompatible spec for which they couldn't get people to agree on a single path. The development of the "pax" utility by the POSIX committee is a particularly horrifying example. That said, autoconf also deals with some monstrosities nobody should have to deal with these days. (Ancient Eunice, anyone? Domain/OS?)
(Have you ever programmed in C? You can certainly see where Unix gets its features from - terse, cryptic and messy.)
Heh. Actually, Unix is terse because it was developed and originally used on 110-baud teletypewriters. I've *used* a KSR33; you quickly come to appreciate the fact that Unix commands are terse. C has its issues, but the original K&R C was quite simple and elegant. (And IMO preferable to its predecessor BCPL.) -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH