On 06/15/2011 04:19 PM, 夜神 岩男 wrote:
> Sorry, JB, I usually avoid posting (hence the trash email address), but
> not today because this hit home.
>
> On Wed, 2011-06-15 at 22:06 +0000, JB wrote:
>> Clyde E. Kunkel<clydekunkel7734<at> cox.net> writes:
>>
>>> ...
>>> All this said, I am beginning to believe Fedora is more and more an
>>> experiment in social engineering.
>>> ...
>>
>> That's a well-chosen remark :-)
>> "Social engineering is the art of manipulating people into performing
>> actions...".
>
> Sometimes this does seem the case, but on the other hand considering the
> size of the open source community these days (as opposed to say, 1994,
> before there was a real label for it) there is no way to make a decision
> that everyone will agree with. There are too many people to please and
> no possible way everyone can communicate everything to each other and
> discuss prior to making a decision on something. Of course, these days
> blogging has trained people to be more self-important *and* noisier than
> ever. Another way of saying this is perhaps that the self-important used
> to do more and say less, and by simply doing they were de facto in
> charge. Argument from irrelevant people clogs lists more than it used to
> -- or perhaps I am getting old and nostalgic.
>
> Of course the "quietly doing" part above is, and forever will be, the
> secret to having things your way in open source -- or actually in any
> tech. Working implementations of ideas carry far more weight than any
> argument in a mailing list.
>
>> I am also surprised (have been for long time) by seeing Linux projects violating
>> UNIX principles of software development.
>> In this particular context, I am disappointed that they, apparently, lack
>> oversight by management, starting with the design phase.
>
> This does not surprise me in the least. As open source has become more
> high profile it has attracted the attention of and absorbed the vanity
> developers who used to write their pet apps in Pascal, QBASIC or Java on
> Windows (or OS/2 if they were l33+), and now play with whatever vanity
> language is popular this week from within the confines of whatever open
> source project they think will make them famous(ish). This sort of
> developer often can't tell you who Fred Brooks, Eric Raymond, Donald
> Knuth, Ken Thompson, or anyone similar are and haven't read anything
> they've written for our benefit about design or the Unixy way to solve
> problems.
>
> Chicken lipstick is in high demand, automated text processing through
> intelligent use of shell scripts is down, overly complex solutions are
> up, overweight software is up, the number of people who have ever
> learned to configure their system starting with a minimal install (not
> even touching the number of users who can't build their own system from
> source) is way down, etc.
>
> These are simply signs that the community has changed because the people
> who remember what the Unixy way of doing things was has become a much
> smaller percentage of the population as we've absorbed a million haX0r
> d00dz from the Windows world. That expansion is not bad and the new guys
> certainly mean well, but we've definitely not done enough to familiarize
> newcomers with the history of Unix, who the original old guys were, what
> they were thinking, and the depth of thought that went into a project
> before the first line of code was written back in the day.
>
> It doesn't help that C and Lisp are considered "too hard" to teach in
> allegedly credible CS undergrad courses these days. Specific discussion
> in class about what happens within a compiler and how processors
> actually process things has been replaced with rather vague generalities
> (those are "deep subjects that you don't need to worry about") and freed
> the instructors to focus on teaching elementary problem solving in Java
> and Python as if it is deep CS skill. In other words, elementary problem
> solving logic and problem deconstruction theory is now masquerading as
> deep computer science -- the technicals are scary so they are to be
> avoided (what if my students aren't smart enough to pass?!? I might look
> like a bad instructor -- best avoid pointer math and recursion this
> go-around...).
>
> Without achieving that critical mass of fundamental knowledge it is very
> difficult for newcomers to the community to identify exactly why the
> Unix way is better than the Windows way. Their choice to join the open
> source community is therefore based largely on emotional and social
> factors -- this is counter-cultural, it's against The Man/M$/Whoever, "I
> think I have better security (but I don't know what that means on a deep
> level)", its cheaper, etc. -- not on technical grounds. Any reason is
> adequate in my view, but without a firmly set social more that guides
> newcomers to familiarize themselves with the roots of Unix and do their
> basic homework we cannot realistically expect Linux to remain Unixy
> forever.
>
> Just my $2.00.
>
> -Iwao
+1
Very elegantly written. I could not with you more.
If anybody would like an authoritative treatise I recommend the Unix
"Blue Book" from Bell Labs (my memory fails me but I think it was also
Ritchie).
>
>
>
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systemd discussion
Denys Vlasenko 
