Date: Thu, 2 Oct 1997 08:37:35 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: syssgm@dtir.qld.gov.au (Stephen McKay) Cc: pechter@lakewood.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, syssgm@dtir.qld.gov.au Subject: Re: Sysctl variables Message-ID: <199710020837.BAA24945@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199710020620.QAA20756@ogre.dtir.qld.gov.au> from "Stephen McKay" at Oct 2, 97 04:20:56 pm
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> My first reaction to this is "OH MY GOD, NO!!!". Look in the mail archives > for the run_level/run_state wars. I think it's the only time I've beaten > Terry into submission. ;-) To be clear: I am very glad we have no SysV > style run levels. I think they are a technically inferior solution. More of a mutual acknowledgement of irreconcilability than sumbission; I really don't buy the BSD model. An idea can be good, even if it originated with USL (not everyone at USL is the moron that the BSD camps would seem to have us believe). Meanwhile, I want run states, not levels, so that transitions do not have to be monotonically increasing or decreasing. ;-). > On the other hand, there's no reason why the occasional superior item can't > be imported. Digital Unix has a ps command that supports both syntax styles. > I can use "ps -ef" or "ps axl" any time I like. This stuff I'll help with. I use "-gax". If the "no '-' convention is used to distinguish them, there will be a lot of losers... > Similarly, both BSD and SysV printing subsystems suck. If you have a > better one, tell us all about it. Palladioum, from Project Athena at MIT. The only real problem with it is that it soes not specify a general queue management subsystem upon which it is layered. Garrett Wollman and I happen to agree on printing models (from conversations of 3 or more years ago). > The Pyramid dual universe stuff was a pain in the arse. Mostly because of how the user environment is still linked off of a global envp in the user data space instead of as a logical name table off the proc struct. POSIX is the pain in this regard, because of the execve(2) requirements it makes, syntactically. This is a flaw in POSIX (one of many). > All those variant symlinks and stuff just made things pretty much > impossible to get right. You couldn't stay in one universe and do it all; > you had to pop from one to the other to get a useful set of features working. Implementation details. Really. Consider a "Linux ABI Universe" on a FreeBSD system, and the freedom to mix binary types without inheritance of "/compat/<ABITYPE>" in the system call table per ABI... The lack of (effectively) "logical name tables" is what is screwing you. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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