Peter wrote: > Maybe I just don't :( >> e17 doesnt break the whole system > > Any alpha software can. Read the warning label. e17 has caused me to hit > the big red switch on several occasions. >
Then you have a bug in your kernel (or possibly your video driver). It should be impossible for any user program to take down the system. >> wine doesnt break the whole system >> > It can trash lots of files. Seen it. Been there. Oh, and one other little > nasty about wine, you can get hit with a virus, and depending on how your > local drives are configured, this can be a bad thing. You can be hit by a virus without wine too. Just because there are currently no viruses for Linux doesn't mean that they are impossible. Also the damage a virus in wine can do is limited to the user that you are running wine as, unless of course you are stupid enough to run wine as root. > Any "good" kernel, improperly configured or used can do the same. "Why > doesn't usb work? Why doesn't nvidia work? Why doesn't ssh-fuse not > compile? Why can't I access my home filesystem?" etc. How many users > installed hardened or sellinux and went "Oh sh*t" Those are known conditions. Gentoo developers can debug them. A subtle failure caused by a bug in the kernel can be VERY hard to debug. Take for example, a few years ago there was a kernel bug (in vanilla) that caused perl to fail compiling PORTAGE_TMPDIR was on an ext3 filesystem. That sort of bug would be almost impossible to track down if it was caused by some random, untested, duct-tape patchset that the user had installed. > > Listen, I'm not going to prolong this. My point was and IS that sources > are just that. They are not applications. They must be configured > correctly to run. If you're going to promote and publish -mm and -ck, then > you can't rightly call a source based on -ck a "pos kernel." Maybe by your > standards, but not by mine, or the others who follow this particular > thread on bz and the forums. -mm and -ck are both produced by extremely competent, and knowledgeable kernel hackers. -nitro or whatever it's called these days is just a bunch of random patches thrown together by someone who knows how to munge patches without knowing their actual effect. It's actually not terribly difficult to munge patches in code that you are unfamiliar with (I have done it many times myself), but doing this in a kernel can subtle cause breakages all over the system. > There's lots of evil out there, but kernel sources are no worse than a pos > application or alpha software. Kernel sources can cause all sorts of breakages that normal software can't. For example, there is no way for a random app to cause certain strings of data to fail to be written to disk, or off-by-one errors reading certain random files. Both of these are possible, along with many other hard to detect and diagnose breakages in the kernel. The kernel is _not_ just another program, its the main arbiter of system resources and as such can break the system in ways that even the most malicious user programs can only dream of. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
