Re: [tlug] Dmesg and CPU Information

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On Mon, 7 May 2007, Attila Kinali wrote:

> I'm sorry to say this, but you are showing sure signs of what i call
> not-my-unix-sickness.

I would say I might well have some familiarity with this disease, given
that I've been through some four or five different flavours of Unix
since I started on 4.1BSD way back when.

But I have two things to point out, here:

    1. When I give a somewhat (ha!) negative opinion of something,
    do keep in mind that amongst us NetBSD folks (well, more like
    almost-ex-NetBSD folks, now) we seriously considered taking as our
    motto, "We suck less!" (It's still my favourite choice of motto.)

    2. The guy who more or less invited me to be a NetBSD developer
    (Perry Metzger) recently moved his ThinkPad from NetBSD to Linux and
    is raving about it; also, my business partner, Bryan Buecking, has
    switched; in both cases I consider them to have done an eminently
    reasonable thing, and I'm seriously contemplating moving myself.

> It's amazing what degree of inflexibility people can show when they
> have to switch from Linux to BSD to Solaris...

For what it's worth, I'm still a big fan of Solaris 1 in many ways, and
though the SunOS 5 kernel is great piece of work, I couldn't handle well
the userland it came with....

(For the rest of you, that's an obscure joke. Solaris 1 is BSD userland.
SunOS 5 is a System V-like kernel. If you don't know what System V is, well,
that's Linux now.)

> Just because something is presented in a little bit different manner,
> with a little bit more info here, but less there, it's imediatly
> becoming bad bad bad.

Feel free to address my specific complaints. I think I've got pretty
good reasons for thinking that the Linux 2.6 dmesg output is inferior to
NetBSDs, and the whole device attachment model, for that matter, but I'm
certainly willing to listen to other opinions.

And that that particular thing is worse (if indeed it is) doesn't
even mean that Linux is worse than NetBSD: it just means that in that
particular area, NetBSD sucks less. But I'm not going to buy into
any sort of, "oh, it's different, but they're both equally good"
politically-nice nonsense. If you think that all--or even a significant
number of--features on them are both equally good, you're just lacking
in the ability to judge goodness.

Sorry for sounding a bit harsh there, since I suspect you really do know
what you're talking about, and you just jumped to a conclusion about
what I was saying.

cjs
--
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974

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