Re: tlug: FreeBSD News issue 2

[Rex Walters <rex@example.com>]

I'm up to my neck in real work, but I can't help posting to this thread.

The free market (free-for-all) bazaar style, multi-distribution, Linux
way of things has definitely "won" in terms of number of installations,
radical new development, etc., etc.  But I'm not alone in finding the
formal code review and cathedral-ish aspects of OpenBSD (not FreeBSD) 
also quite appealing.  

The Berkeley fileysystem (the data structure, not the hierarchy naming
conventions) is also arguably more reliable or at least better understood
than ext2fs.  [Not my argument: this flame-fest is all over the advocacy
news groups, qmail mailing lists, etc.  Me, I'm *perfectly* happy with
ext2fs stability and depend on it daily for *work* not personal use.  In
a nutshell: no code I'm aware of actually fsync's directories as
required for absolute crash-proof atomicity for transaction oriented
programming with ext2fs -- most code expects Berkely FFS (UFS)
semantics.]

The "net-net" (I use the phrase out of sheer perversity -- I despise
this particular abuse of English beyond all others) is that I use and
depend on Linux for everything I do today, but if I were to put up a
huge, popular, heavy load, single-task server of some sort on the
internet tomorrow, I would take a long hard look at OpenBSD.

My feelings on the topic are somewhat voltairesque:  I mourn the death
of any Linux distribution or *BSD distribution.  The computer world in
general, and the Linux world in particular, is a better place with the
*BSD distributions and advocates still around.  If nothing else it keeps
us Linux folks on our toes.

Regards,
-- 
Rex

P.S.  http://www.openbsd.org/ is worth a gander.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Next TLUG Meeting: 13 June Sat, Tokyo Station Yaesu gate 12:30
Featuring Stone and Turnbull on .rpm and .deb packages
Next Nomikai: (?) July, 19:30 Tengu TokyoEkiMae 03-3275-3691
--------------------------------------------------------------
Sponsor: PHT, makers of TurboLinux http://www.pht.co.jp