My background, in the 1980's and 1990's I was a UNIX and network
sysadmin, cut my teeth on SunOS 4.1, argued with Sun incessantly about
the evils of SVr4 and SunOS 5 (the first few years, were really, really bad)
Always compiled my own stuff from source.
I have a question for the group.
What actually belongs in an operating system?
I see, or at least I think I see, a lot of effort on various platforms,
to maintain applications (gimp? really? bundled?!), and when humans are
scarce, is this at the expense of device drivers, installation systems
and so on?
For a little while, I recall one of the *BSD ports systems being used on
some versions of SunOS 5.10+ (correct me if I'm wrong), which seemed a
good pathway to take, but now we seem to have this weird IPS thingo and
all the barriers to entry that it introduces. Every damn UNIX/clone
system has its own awful system for ports/packages/dependency mess
making and they *all* suck.
Anyway, enough preamble ...
An O/S (general purpose), must include :
Compiler(s) and standard libraries for the common languages (C/C++ etc,
whatever GCC calls itself these days) so you can compile the system on
itself.
Scripting languages (sh, perl, python)
shells (sh, csh, tsch, bash etc)
A set of robust device drivers that 'just work' (this is 2025, you
shouldn't need to go futzing around to find the right driver for your
video card, it should *just work*)
A sane, sensible, simple install setup that works on modern hardware
without hacks. This, these days, means all the various BIOS stuff on PC
hardware shouldn't need weirdness to work.
Backup solution (borg? tar, zfs send etc)
A bombproof filesystem that supports auto up and downsizing etc (ZFS is
pretty close to perfect) and is cross-platform (hrm, it sorta is, but
then there's ZFS features, and they're not standard anymore, it *might*
work ... )
Some sort of sensible firewall and tripwire'ish solution. Something
that makes FTP (ha!) "just work" etc.
System performance monitoring (top, ntop, nagios plugins, the standards
that we all use)
I don't think there'd be too much dissent wrt that list. Where it gets
interesting is what then gets bundled in, and how?
Should, for example, apache be bundled in? With the maintenance issues
that this brings with it? Should VLC? Should Firefox or some other
browser? If it's a desktop system, you'd want FF and Thunderbird or
similar, some reasonable version of TWM (golly, I am old!) but for a
server? I don't know where you draw the lines, but it does look like
"we" spend a lot of time farting around with applications that really,
aren't up to a niche community to support. I use VirtualBox on my O/I
servers, but should it be bundled, or something that we get with source
and compile ourselves?
I dunno .. Just rambling on a Wednesday arvo ;)
Carl
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