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A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

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Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#161

Post by papsosouid »

rbanffy wrote: post #136
papsosouid wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The reason your work machine, running BSD, works the way it does (and self-assembles that way) is because each part of its software environment is independent, designed for different goals and constraints and it just happens to work together well enough you can work with it No, that's not the case at all actually. FreeBSD like the other BSDs is a complete OS, designed and built as a complete OS. It is not a collecti…

The expression "a complete OS" is not what it used to mean. Are you implying FreeBSD has an X server, a dozen compilers and interpreters, a GUI and other components equally "designed and built" as a cohesive thing?

No, I am implying that those things aren't part of the OS. You can tell, because they aren't part of the OS, they are installed with the 3rd party package management tools. In linux there is no base OS, everything is 3rd party packages. There is no difference between firefox and ls. In BSDs there is, ls is not 3rd party software packaged up to be installed, it is part of the OS, written by, maintained by, documented by the same people as the kernel, the standard library, etc.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#162

Post by ChuckMcM »

phkamp wrote: post #58

OK, I'll make a couple of general observations here. First: It would be a big help for this discussion, if we could have the informal convention that people who were employed in an IT job before 1990 marked their post. I think it would show a quite clear divergence of attitude. Second: It's very obivious, that a lot of you have never been anywhere near the kind of software project posited in the "cathedral" meme, ins…

Ok, pre-1990 person here, and the piece resonated quite strongly with me. But I note that there is a third axis which isn't well covered, which is 'volunteer' vs 'paid'.

It is important to note the distinction between FreeBSD's package system and say Debian apt. In FreeBSD I can make from source some package, and in Debian I can apt-get install a package, because the Debian packages are prebuilt it just comes over in several chunks and doesn't need to build. (yes you can pull prebuilt packages for FreeBSD too). But my point is that the packaging system of FreeBSD, as used, conflates building the packages and using the packages.

So if I write a perl script that goes through the source code and changes all the calls to fstat() to match your configuration then to build I need perl even though you do not need perl. (as an example). But to run I don't care if you have perl or not.

But lets get back to the volunteer/paid thing again. People who volunteer rarely volunteer to clean the shit out of the horse stalls, no they volunteer to ride in the races and build a new horse. So you end up with a lot of stuff around you don't want.

Sadly for operating systems, and the original rant is really operating systems, there really isn't a cathedral/bazaar model, its more of a democracy / feudalism kind of thing. Nobody 'owns' the final user experience for the OS in FreeBSD/Linux discussions.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#163

Post by LaGrange »

phkamp wrote: post #153
LaGrange wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a cathedral because it was not on a software but a near-monopoly market? I love taking metaphors too far, so I'll just notice that "near-monopoly" is what cathedrals are all about.

Try reading again ? Microsoft didn't architect their software as software, they shaped it as tools of monopoly enforcement. There are numerous accounts from people involved about how marketing decisions relating to cutting of 3rd parties or trying to bludgon somebody into submission caused them to cripple their own software and its architecture. See the evidence in the M$/Novell case for ironclad evidence of this.

Actually, the amusing thing is you're still reinforcing the cathedral metaphor. If the primary target of the cathedral was an event hall capable of housing a bunch of people it could have been built in a way more reasonable way. The point of cathedral is to be the biggest and most impressive kid on the block. Therefore I'd say that MS was designed in a cathedral way to achieve cathedral goal.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#164

Post by cooldeal »

phkamp wrote: post #153
LaGrange wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a cathedral because it was not on a software but a near-monopoly market? I love taking metaphors too far, so I'll just notice that "near-monopoly" is what cathedrals are all about.

Try reading again ? Microsoft didn't architect their software as software, they shaped it as tools of monopoly enforcement. There are numerous accounts from people involved about how marketing decisions relating to cutting of 3rd parties or trying to bludgon somebody into submission caused them to cripple their own software and its architecture. See the evidence in the M$/Novell case for ironclad evidence of this.

M$? Really? I thought HN and seasoned OSS developers were above this kind of petty name calling and sneering.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#165

Post by phkamp »

doktrin wrote: post #159
thebooktocome wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to phkamp, iOS is a cathedral kind of project. I was hoping someone would bring up OS X and how horrible its cathedral-born API became around 10.5, but I was born in '85 and therefore have no right to speak in this thread.

According to phkamp, iOS is a cathedral kind of project. This is true. The OP has made several somewhat-arbitrary and vague assertions about what may or may not constitute a "Cathedral", on top of lambasting others for not agreeing with his definition ("Read Brooks Book") Excerpts from the HN discussion : "Windows and Office are actually not examples of cathedrals, because the architectural focus of Microsoft was not…

You never read ESR's essay/book, did you ?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#166

Post by phkamp »

cooldeal wrote: post #164
phkamp wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try reading again ? Microsoft didn't architect their software as software, they shaped it as tools of monopoly enforcement. There are numerous accounts from people involved about how marketing decisions relating to cutting of 3rd parties or trying to bludgon somebody into submission caused them to cripple their own software and its architecture. See the evidence in the M$/Novell case for ironclad evidence of this.

M$? Really? I thought HN and seasoned OSS developers were above this kind of petty name calling and sneering.

You know, first time I encountered the "M$" shorthand was in a TELEX (look it up if you don't know what that is) from Commodore Corporate about pricing of the the PC10 computer. I have used it ever since, based in part on what was not very diplomatically expressed in that missive about M$'s attitude to licensing.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#167

Post by pdw »

engtech wrote: post #14

I hadn't realized that autoconf used M4. M4 is amazingly hard to work with, mainly because it uses ` and ' as delimiters, making it very hard to even read unless you have syntax highlighting set up to show those quotes as different characters. Here's an example from the web: define(`START_HTML', ` $1 ')

m4 allows you to redefine the delimiters (yes, it's that crazy). Autoconf uses square brackets.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#168

Post by icarus127 »

rbanffy wrote: post #109
phkamp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you bothered to check who wrote that article, before you started speculating about things you could have found out with a few google searches ? You seem to assume that cathedrals are "slow-moving, centralized, big up-front" designs, where did you get that idea ? Ever looked into how USA put a man on the moon ? Maybe you should. Also: Read Brooks book, if you can.

> I wonder if you bothered to check who wrote that article, I don't think the appeal to authority fallacy will fly here. We are all too smart for that. You arguments should be evaluated for their coherence and, in the end, it really doesn't matter who you are or what you did if you are wrong. To use your example, it doesn't matter if you are Von Braun himself. If you don't bring enough propellant for your descent eng…

The point isn't an appeal to authority, it's that the author is a supporter of open source. Not Microsoft.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#169

Post by billswift »

pasbesoin wrote: post #75

Thirteen years ago, Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O'Reilly Media, 2001) Off by two? Seriously, though, how do you get 13 out of that (unless calculating from when the author conceivably began working on the book per se)? I'm starting to read the article; I found mildly disconcerting that the first sentence appears to make a mis-statement, but I don't expect that to foreshadow the meat of the messa…

That is the revised edition, the first edition of the book was published in 1999, which was 13 years ago.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#170

Post by anuraj »

The bazaar was possible because cathedrals like Unix existed which were robust enough to gloat over failures of sound design on part of newbie programmers. Yes, we are now coming to increasingly complex systems in the web too, which are still held together with nothing more than duct tape. Scripting languages which are not type safe, cut and paste and tolerant browsers which hog memory are all manifestaions. Not a great way to build a huge edifice I would say.
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