Re: [tlug] Re: Alan Cox's remark at Fosdem

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

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

    wileyc> With that statement in mind, what are your thoughts about
    wileyc> this:

    wileyc>  -- formatting is intact

Asshole.  We already knew that about LWN, OK?

    lwn> Christoph Lameter would like to get rid of the disconnect
    lwn> between in-kernel and hardware page tables; to that end, he
    lwn> has proposed a new abstraction layer which would handle
    lwn> access to the processor's memory management unit (MMU). With
    lwn> the new layer in place, there would be no more hierarchical
    lwn> page tables in the core kernel.

Uh, "microkernel architecture, here we come!"?  I thought Linus said
"No, no, and hell, no!" to that years ago?

    wileyc> Am I just old-fashioned,

No, but it doesn't take a merchant mariner to see that you guys are
both military.  You want an operating system that works like a
Kalashnikov, right?  A good straightforward friend that won't let you
down when the bad guys come over the walls....

    wileyc> or are the VM guys smoking crack?  This makes, what, the
    wileyc> third VM rewrite in two years, right?

Depends on what their goals are.  Obviously, stability of the VM
module doesn't rank terribly high.  Maybe they just enjoy rewriting
the VM manager.  If Bob Young or Larry Augustin will pay, who are you
and I to complain?

We're (ie, XEmacs) dealing with the same kind of "what _are_ we trying
to accomplish, anyway?"issue right now.

We've got some people who want to apply grungy patches (they're Irish
and Australian, but the patches are Yamato-damashii through and
through) to fix the little bugs and ensure the big ones will be
unfixable, we've got some people who see the project as a great
platform for their grad students to write theses, we've got some
people who think XEmacs would be able to compete with Visual Studio if
only C-x, C-c, C-v mapped to cut, copy, paste, and we've got some
people who are simply on crack (no, the last two groups are NOT the
same!)

And I sympathize with all of them (except that my DOC is a little less
twisted than crack).  But XEmacs isn't mission-critical for me, at
least not in the amount of time it takes to cvs update and build the
last release that worked for me.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.