[TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other

[Steve Johnson]

I too have worked with Linus, and agree with the good programmer and
good architect.
I think he managed the project well for quite a while, but never quite
recovered from the
GNU incursions.

As far as stability and portability is concerned, GNU is a disaster. 
Even when a feature is
the same across different architectures the option names and values
are often different.
In one company I worked for we had two releases nearly derailed
because of Linux/GCC
issues.  In one case, the way locales worked was different between
different versions of
Linux.  In another case, GCC simply silently removed an option that
we depended on and we
nearly shipped a product that would have bombed out if the user had
already upgraded
to the newest GCC.

In terms of following the Unix philosophy, the widow managers on Linux
are getting more
bizarre by the year.  Hitting a key at random by mistake can cause
windows to disappear,
screens of unknown utility to appear, everything to disappear, etc. 
Setting options to try to 
achieve some kind of consistency is totally different in each
system.  Etc. etc.   There seems 
to be no larger organizing principle at work...

----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry McVoy" <lm at mcvoy.com>
To:"Joerg Schilling" <schily at schily.net>
Cc:<tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:Mon, 20 Feb 2017 14:24:57 -0800
Subject:Re: [TUHS] Mach for i386 / Mt Xinu or other

 Oh brother.

 On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 07:14:44PM +0100, Joerg Schilling wrote:
 > Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
 > 
 > > Linus had the qualities of being a good programmer, a good
architect,
 > > and a good manager. I've never seen all 3 in a person before or
since.
 > 
 > My memory is different. He claims that his intention is to keep 
 > kernel/userspace interfaces stable, but given the fact that this
did never 
 > happen, I tend to believe that he lacks the understanding on what
all is part 
 > of the kernel/userspace interface.

 So you're taking on the guy who won the Unix wars, has stayed in
charge for
 a couple of decades, created the OS that runs on 498 of 500 super
computers,
 the OS that runs on more phones than apple's phones, tablets, and
computers
 combined?

 I've worked with Linus, I know him pretty well. I stand by my
description
 above and nothing you've said has changed (and isn't likely to).

 As for interfaces, huh. I've got two decades of supporting a
commercial
 product that uses file system, networking, VM interfaces and I can't
 remember a time were we had to change something because Linux broke
 an API.

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