>> Let's instead ask us who, and why, some people do drift over to >> NetBSD? I would say that a large portion of those are people who >> for some reason or other have gotten tired of the magical modules, >> autoconfiguration, and magic tools that manage the system for you, >> and who wants to have better control and understanding of the >> system.
> Absolutely! > Thanks for these wise words, johnny. "What they said." Thank you, Johnny, for putting it so eloquently. This is very much what bothers me about the directions NetBSD is headed, and has for quite a while: it appears to be trying to turn itself into Yet Another Unix Variant, different from Linux and Solaris and their ilk only in the brand name on the case. People say things like "we'll never win over the Linux users without $FEATURE!", which makes me say "why do you want to?". If I want Linux - or Solaris, or any of various other Unices - I know where to find it; if NetBSD succeeds in turning into a Linux - or whatever - clone, it will have lost the reasons it previously gave me to prefer it. "But we're not trying to do that!" Enough of you are that that's NetBSD's direction. You're trying to come up with point-and-drool installers. You're trying to fully support "desktop environment"s. You're trying to make system administration easy for non-sysadmins. You are, in short, trying to give it the things I picked NetBSD to get away from, the things Johnny summarized so well: lots of magic code doing things users are not only not expected to understand but are expected to not understand (and under whose hood prying is not supported). /etc/rc.d/*. Modular kernels. Sysinst. build.sh. I don't want a system that has any code under whose hood prying is not supported; if the answer to "I'm having trouble with $FOO" is "messing with $FOO is not supported; use our magic code instead", that's a bug as far as I'm concerned. I've seen it called elitist to prefer, for example, installing by hand. I can understand that point of view, but I think it misses the point fairly fundamentally. It's the difference between inclusive and exclusive - I don't want to keep hoi polloi out by demanding understanding before they are worthy to (say) install NetBSD; rather, I want to bring them in by imparting that understanding, with things like manual installation serving as teaching (and self-testing) tools. Nothing teaches like experience. Yes, this excludes the people who don't understand and don't want to. To steal a term from marketing, I don't think NetBSD should try to serve that market segment; it's already well-served by others, and I see no percentage in trying to join them. It doesn't serve them better (indeed, by adding yet another alternative they neither are nor want to be competent to choose among, it serves them worse) and it doesn't serve NetBSD (people who don't even want to understand are among the least likely to turn into developers and contribute back). So what's to like? /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
