On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 05:46:18AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote: > I disagree. It doesn't suck. It's the way UNIX and Linux have done this > for dozens of years, and it's the way countless sysadmins know and love. > "Sucks" might be true from the point of view of "hey look at this great > thing I just designed", but it's very much not true from the point of > view of the sysadmin working on the weekend who's just thinking "gee, > what the heck is going on, why won't this just work how it has done for > the past twenty years?". In other words "suck" depends on viewpoint. The big kernel lock doesn't suck. It's the way SMP UNIX did things for dozens of years, and it's the way countless kernel hackers know and love. "Sucks" might be true from the point of view of "hey look at this great fine-grained locking I just designed", but it's very much not true from the poit of the driver author working on the weekend who's just thinking "gee, what the heck is going on, why won't this just work how it has done for the past twenty years?". In other words "suck" depends on viewpoint. Improvement means change, and change will inevitably upset some people who would prefer to do things in exactly the same way that they always have done. If we assert that all viewpoints are equally valid then every single thing we've done in Fedora sucks. In this case there are sound technical arguments against configuration by command line argument or environment variable (just like there are against the BKL), and while we should obviously attempt to make any transition as painless as possible for administrators, that doesn't serve as a counter to those technical arguments. They suck. Unarguably. -- Matthew Garrett | mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
