Re: [9fans] Announce: standalone libixp

[Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com>]

[ This is mostly offtopic and the only reason I send it to the mailing
  list is the last paragraph. I apologize for any inconvenience ]

On Mon, 2007-07-02 at 02:45 +0200, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> * Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, 2007-06-30 at 18:47 +0200, Uriel wrote:
> > > Most of your changes don't make any sense to me, pkg-config is at best
> > > stupid, and shared libraries are plain disgraceful.
> > 
> >   I apologize if I already had sent it out, but I'm close to putting
> > a petition out there to ban the shared libraries. 
> 
> A petition ? Addressed to whom ? 

  Well, obviously to all sane developers of the world [hm... should
I start using smilies now or is it too late?]

> > http://blogs.sun.com/rvs/entry/what_does_dynamic_linking_and
> 
> Starts w/ typical, stupid U$ flaming: $what_I_hate is like communism.

  I think the level of your insight into how the communism argument
went shows just how much insight you got into the rest of what I have
written. Now, for the record: I grew up in the USSR and I moved to
US in my 20s. I have benefited from both systems tremendously, but I 
also have seen their major drawbacks. Unlike most of the Russian
and American citizens who never travel I have thus been expelled from
the psychological Eden. I had to face reality. The same happened to
me when I discovered UNIX after long journey through the Microsoft land.
At first I was amazed, and only later I realized that both systems
do have shortcomings if engineering problems are tackled by people
who, how shall I put it, have no taste. The important thing to me
is that intelligent human beings are supposed to *talk* about these
things, not just paraphrase Churchill. The point of the title for
my blog article was to relate a frustration when something that is
supposed to be very beneficial doesn't work because reality has
not been taken into account (hey! I'm still angry at good old 
SU for showing me want universal health care and free top notch
education can do for a country and then collapsing!). 

> Next logic step would be declaring dynamic linking "unamerican".
> Well, those ideas are really irrelevant to me. 

  Apparently, they are. Otherwise you wouldn't have had such a strong
and emotional reaction.  

> * Broken compiler: I don't know which compiler you're talkig about.

  Sun Studio, Intel and g++. They all suffered greatly from it at one
point or another. Did you know that chances are you WILL NOT be able
to run a C++ program on a Red Hat 4 if you compiled it on Red Hat 3? 

>   Never ever seen such trouble in recent 15 years.
 
  Apparently you haven't been looking hard enough. But then again, some
people never seem to have any problems with Microsoft Windows security
model either.

>   An clean namespace separation would have done the trick.

  Of course it wouldn't. Please educate yourself on library versioning
and what a mess GNU made out of it. The original Sun's design was
pretty misguided but at least it worked in the world of a single OS.

> * Bug vs. feature: with clean development methods, it's really 
>   clear what some module should do. First design, then implement
>   and test. If you just hack up something w/o any clear spec,
>   you can easily run into trouble. In that case: your fault.

  Wow! I have seen maybe 3 engineers in my life who could pull this
off (has Ken ever needed unit testing). The rest of us are hopeless.
If you are trying to tell me you are the 4th one -- I would have
to wait till you prove it with something real. Before that happens
the statement above is beyond naive. Its dangerously naive.

> * Commercial or half-Commercial stuff like OO: I'm neither resposible 
>   for their unability to produce clean code, nor do I care. 

  An important question is -- are you capable of it?

>   If I, for
>   some reason get interested in such an package, ie. Mozilla, I just
>   break off my own branch and cleanup things as I feel its right.
>   This includes kicking off all these bundled 3rd-party libs.

  Well, I try not to be cynical. May be you are the 4th one. I wish you
luck. You had all the right intentions when this thread got started. 
I also wish that you spend a bit of time looking around and learning
from the mistakes others made. But then again, reinventing the wheel
is always much more fun compared to listening to the old geezers.

> We all have our different destinies and different ways of thinking
> or coding. IMHO it's best if we try to learn from each other with
> leaving others in peace, instead of wasting resoures by stupid 
> conflicts.

  I have said it once and I'm going to say this again: to me the value
of this mailing list is not even so much around Plan9 as it is around
the amount of a collective experience people on it seem to have. This
is pretty much the only place where whenever people tell you that
you're making a mistake -- chances are: you ARE making a mistake. It is
your choice to either listen and learn something or disregard it all
and move on.

Thanks,
Roman.