VanLUG Email Archive
> > There are currently 125 or so developers who have write access to
> > the CVS repository. This means you have to talk to one of 125 people
> > to get your change into NetBSD-current (and thus the next release
> > of NetBSD).
>
> Convincing 125 closly tight developers is more difficult than finding
> another distribution, which have what you want, in the way you want it...
Huh? You don't have to convince 125 of them, you have to convince
*one* of them.
> Jim Pick have counted 50 distributions (not counting any local dist, ie
> japanese, german etc)...
Sure, but all the distributions use the same kernel, and there's
only one pair of people determining what does and doesn't go in a
Linux kernel. You win here, you lose there, yadayada.
> Which means that there's bound to be something
> out there that suits everybody (more or less anyway... :). I don't like
> *BSD, because I don't like the way it's distributed... I really hate it
> when people tell me how things should be done, and I don't have the time
> to try to convince the whole *BSD world that we should do this, and put
> that thing here etc...
Well, you don't have to convince the whole BSD world, you just have
to convince one of the three BSD distributions. BSD is not as
monolithic as you make out. Also, there's nothing stopping you from
doing your own BSD distribution, should you not like the ones out
there. I think that the fact that we don't have a zillion different
distributions is a testement to the good design of the userland,
and what is and isn't included in it.
And, as I've mentioned before, the fragmentation caused by the
number of Linux distributions out there causes its own problems.
You can take a binary compiled for NetBSD 1.0 and run it on any
NetBSD system out there, so long as it's not been mucked up too
much by the user. Under Linux? Well, you start hoping you have the
right libc.
> I don't like the BSD init tree, so I don't use RH... I like the BSD/SYSV mix
> that Debian uses...
That's a fair enough reason to choose Debian.
> > Research problem: how many people have the ability, without consulting
> > with another person, to add a feature to the next Linux kernel
> > release?
>
> Very few, granted... But I'm not interested in that...
That's ok. I'm not asking you to be interested in it. I'm just
responding to yet another propagation of the myth that BSD is more
`closed' than Linux.
cjs
Curt Sampson
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