On Mon, 5 Dec 2005, J.C. Roberts wrote:
You certainly have a valid point when it comes to doing useful
production work with Oracle on OpenBSD but from what you've written, it
seems like you do not value the "bug finding" process all that much.
You could not be more wrong. Do *not* presume that you may
assume what I do or do not value.
I just got done rewriting a bunch of the logging code in tinyproxy because
the "bug" in that case happened to be extremely verbose logging because
the original writers didn't understand using the software in a 1000+ user
environment.
My
opinion is the exact opposite; the main reason for attempting such a
configuration *_is_* to find the bugs and hopefully fix them. Sure,
you're right it's a royal pain, but if no one does the work, it never
gets done.
Yes, but there's fixing bugs you can get at, and there's the
banging of one's head against a brick wall created from running a closed
source package in an *emulated* environment.
When you're starting off, duct tape and bailing wire are your best
friends mainly because there is no other way to get going. You can kind
of think of it as boot strapping. It's not going to happen over night or
anytime soon.
You're not getting it. It's not bootstrapping, it's a gross,
ugly, nasty hack. This is not making a port work, this is kludging
something into functioning when a much better effort could be made on
other platforms or by using other database packages.
In a nutshell, it comes down to your goals and your time frame. If you
want the Oracle code you run to be more reliable, robust and secure on
"$very_large_hardware that OpenBSD doesn't support yet" just using
OpenBSD to find some bugs could be a worthwhile experiment even if you
never actually use OBSD/Oracle in production.
This only works for a native port! You're not running Oracle on OpenBSD,
you're running Oracle on what Oracle thinks is some wierd LINUX.
A lot of companies would consider such efforts to be a waste of
time/money but as you can see by this thread, there are some people who
think the task might be a fun or interesting hack... -You can view it as
the difference between those people who follow the warning on the
sticker "Warranty Void If Removed" and those people who are more
interested in learning what can be learned.
And some people think drilling holes in their head leads to some
deep inner wisdom. This does not make it a good idea. If someone wants
to use *linux emulation* to run Oracle on OpenBSD and think it's doing
some good, they can go right ahead.
I've been there and done that with trying to hack evil crap into
working in places it shouldn't, and all I've learned is that it leads
to nothing but a ton of pain. Some people need object lessons in said
pain before it sinks in. Their call, I guess. I'd rather work on
something more useful or interesting.
Yes. And I think we will both agree the decision of what to use in
production really comes down to the requirements. On the other hand, I
think if a company really values the data they store in their production
Oracle db's, financing a bit of experimentation to find/fix bugs is in
the best interest of company long term.
Again, you think this will lead to bugfixes. I marvel at your raw
idealism.
I think the best way you could understand my view on the whole
Oracle/OBSD thing is by analogy...
The OpenBSD port to the SGI-O2 platform has been ongoing for some time
and even after almost 2 years of work, the port is still "incomplete"
since we don't have an X server. None the less, the O2 porting effort
has allowed new types and classes of bugs to be found mainly because the
bugs have not shown up on other architectures. Fixing the newly
discovered bugs benefits all the supported architectures. Since you
don't have X, you can't use your O2 as a "production desktop" yet but
the porting effort has still been beneficial to the project as a whole,
including all the folks who only use other archs.
Your analogy is flawed.
The discovered bugs are actively used by the OpenBSD devs to fix. As you
yourself have even asserted, there's a pretty good chance that Oracle
would probably ignore the bug reports, and given that it'd be coming from
an environment that is nowhere near the intended platforms that they coded
for, I wouldn't blame them.
--
Signing off,
Joseph C. Bender
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the
people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal
government is our servant, not our master." ---Thomas Jefferson
