From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2007 20:50:24 -0700 From: Roman Shaposhnik Subject: Re: [9fans] Announce: standalone libixp In-reply-to: <20070702004546.GC10308@nibiru.local> To: weigelt@metux.de, Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Message-id: <1183434625.10665.77.camel@linux.site> MIME-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT References: <20070630153814.GA17008@nibiru.local> <5d375e920706300947g5313fe83i9b8a2144293091e@mail.gmail.com> <1183332159.10665.3.camel@linux.site> <20070702004546.GC10308@nibiru.local> Cc: Topicbox-Message-UUID: 8f7d973a-ead2-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 [ 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 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.