Re: [tlug] *BSD vs Linux for severs?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "wileyc" == Christopher SEKIYA <wileyc@example.com> writes:

    >> 2- Also I have as a general belief that *BSD is more stable
    >> than Linux, of course I have no data to back this up, but ...

    wileyc> This belief is well-founded.  Linux frankly isn't
    wileyc> engineered very well, primarily due to the fact that
    wileyc> kernel development and userland development are decoupled.

Huh?

This is the case for most apps on any platform (except for "chikan"
platforms which are always exposing themselves for perversity's sake).
Most userland code talks only to libc, which is neither fish nor fowl,
of course.  This is The Way That God Planned It (but see the OT:
Niven's Birthday thread on comp.lang.python re programming languages
for Moties).

It seems to me that (1) the BSD devel groups tend to have far tighter,
smaller developer cores than Linux does, and thus the best programmers
seem to do a couple of kernel subsystems as well as some of userland,
raising the average quality of userland code, and (2) Linux delegates
so much of its userland development to projects which substitute
politicking for coding standards (a big advantage for the OS from the
wrong side of the Bay).  These aren't problems with the _idea_ of
modularization, more that we don't know how to scale decentralized OSS
development to something as big and hairy as Linux has become.

Or maybe I don't understand what you mean by "decoupled".

Isn't the real issue:

    wileyc> Good design and implementation == stablility.  Major linux
    wileyc> kernel subsystems keep being rewritten from scratch (in
    wileyc> the stable series!), which is indicative of poor design
    wileyc> ...

Or maybe just developers with an irresistable itch.  But of course it
doesn't matter _why_ the subsystems are being rewritten, the
destabilization is the same.  Scary, isn't it.  I'm still running
2.2.x on all my machines.

    wileyc> ... I no longer believe that linux is the best-of-breed UNIX.

Er, this seems to be an opinion from a back-issue, 1998 or so....

-- 
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