A Generation Lost in the Bazaar • Hacker News Board

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#171

Post by papsosouid » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 4:25 PM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #142

papsosouid wrote: post #127

How ironic that this complaint of poor quality and lowered standards comes from a FreeBSD developer who actively attacks people who care about producing quality software. Cathedral vs bazaar isn't the issue. It is simply putting quality as a priority vs not making it a priority. Which is why some cathedrals produce poor quality software (freebsd), and others produce high quality software (netbsd).

I do ?

Remember when freebsd included a closed source binary blob to support atheros wireless chipsets? And some people in the openbsd and netbsd groups decided that since their OSes have quality standards and don't allow garbage like that, they would make an open source driver? And then you yelled shit at them at a conference and called Reyk a terrorist? It is one thing to hate everyone who works an OS other than the one you prefer, that's just typical childishness. But to attack them for having higher standards than you do? Yes, I would say that puts you in the position of "not being one to talk about quality".

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#172

Post by wglb » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 4:25 PM UTC

A very thought-provoking article. (Been programming for pay since 1966 here.)

A lot of the commentary seems to be confusing the waterfall model with the idea of the cathedral.

Another way to make this point is to note how few programmers these days read Dijkstra, or Knuth's TAOCP. (Knuth would have us believe that even he doesn't read it. See Coders At Work.) Among other things, Dijkstra taught understanding the entire program before setting down one line of code. Contrast this with TDD (which, believe it or not, some take to mean Test Driven Design).

Lately I have been in the Application Security business, and nowhere has the issue highlighted by the article been more obvious.

Edit: Mark Williams Company, inventor of Coherent OS, was not a paint company. It started out as Mark Williams Chemical Company, manufacturing Dr. Enuff, a vitamin supplement.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#173

Post by lmm » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 4:32 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #122

lmm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bazaar is perfectly capable of adopting improvements that prove themselves, and eliminating cruft from the past, if the cost is worth it . See the recent systemd fuss. If CMake really is better then eventually all important projects will shift over to it, and distributions will stop installing autoconf by default, or eventually at all. The fact that this hasn't happened already tells us that the practical differe…

The fact that this hasn't happened already tells us that the practical difference isn't big enough to justify expending a lot of effort on switching. Are you arguing that it can't be a good idea, because if it was a good idea it would already have been done?

Yes, you're quite right, I can't use that argument. But the fact that similar ideas have been done tells us that the system is capable of implementing good ideas; autotools' continued existence is not the result of a general problem with the bazaar model; there must be some narrower reason why it hasn't been replaced.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#174

Post by phkamp » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 4:32 PM UTC

papsosouid wrote: post #171

phkamp wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do ?

Remember when freebsd included a closed source binary blob to support atheros wireless chipsets? And some people in the openbsd and netbsd groups decided that since their OSes have quality standards and don't allow garbage like that, they would make an open source driver? And then you yelled shit at them at a conference and called Reyk a terrorist? It is one thing to hate everyone who works an OS other than the one y…

Lets just say that maybe I have a slightly different recollection about that meeting ? :-)

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#175

Post by rbanffy » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 4:38 PM UTC

pmjordan wrote: post #146

rbanffy wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that agreement would be based on our current best understanding of how computers should work. When you factor in the future (and evolving an existing codebase is a huge problem) we have to assume any understanding we have now is incomplete and flawed. That's why things like libtool or autoconf evolved (or, better, were "iteratively designed") to be able to grow and encompass varying and different goals.

So what you're saying is that progressively tidying up a codebase to simplify fulfilling current requirements is always a bad idea because you might remove something that might make a hypothetical future requirement easier to fulfill?

No. I'm just reminding ourselves we don't know what you'll need in the future, that any decisions we make now are subject to change down the road and that it's foolish to assume we can design now what we'll be using ten years from now.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#176

Post by me_again » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 4:38 PM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #112

peterwwillis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Care to enlighten? (Regardless of what may have prompted its development, its use since around 1992 doesn't really discredit my point... It takes care of things for the user that FOSS doesn't deal with, or at least not in a portable way)

InstallShield was a created by a startup, to give windows-apps a non-insane way of installing themselves. Microsoft was forced to buy them, almost at gunpoint, by 3rd. party software developers.

A minor point, but this is wrong in several ways.

InstallShield was never acquired by Microsoft, and was never actually very good. You can think of it as being a leaky abstraction over the underlying horror of Windows Installer, allowing just enough to poke through that it was unreliable. There has never been a really sane way to install windows apps, and there still isn't - the closest approximation today is WiX.

Possibly the manifest-based Windows 8 application packages provide a better story, I'm not familiar enough to say.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#177

Post by papsosouid » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 4:38 PM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #174

papsosouid wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember when freebsd included a closed source binary blob to support atheros wireless chipsets? And some people in the openbsd and netbsd groups decided that since their OSes have quality standards and don't allow garbage like that, they would make an open source driver? And then you yelled shit at them at a conference and called Reyk a terrorist? It is one thing to hate everyone who works an OS other than the one y…

Lets just say that maybe I have a slightly different recollection about that meeting ? :-)

"First talk was OpenBSD's wireless talk. Much rethoric about freedom and little appreciation for the way the world actually works, as opposed to how it looks like it works from the headquarters of OpenBSD.

Asked directly if they thought they could defend their reverse engineering of for instance the Atheros HAL. The answer as I heard it was "Laws don't apply to us".

I guess I'm not the right person to appreciate the valor of their crusade, but somehow their rethoric reminds me too much about Rote Arme Fraktion and similar terrorgroups of the seventies which tried to change society by bombing political correct holes in it.

If OpenBSD aims to corner the paranoid/radical part of the market they're welcome to it for all I care.

Doesn't sound like it is doing anything good for their wireless support however."

I dunno, sounds to me like you bitterly despise anyone who dares to do things correctly instead of doing whatever is expedient. OpenBSD's stance on the wireless issue was correct, has been proven to be correct, and should be admired. And I'm a netbsd guy, so I am "supposed to" hate openbsd.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#178

Post by keeptrying » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 4:40 PM UTC

Nature does pretty well with bazaar style development and she usually wins doesn't she?

There's a lot to be said about building via rapidly iterating around feedback.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#179

Post by tedunangst » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 4:42 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #94

tedunangst wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When OpenBSD replaced GNU libtool with a home grown perl version, it was so much faster I believe it literally cut days off machine time off a full ports build. For smaller packages, with tiny C files, running libtool.sh takes longer than running the compiler does. The majority of build time for some of those packages is still running configure, testing for things like , which the package provides no workaround when…

>When OpenBSD replaced GNU libtool with a home grown perl version, it was so much faster I believe it literally cut days off machine time off a full ports build. For smaller packages, with tiny C files, running libtool.sh takes longer than running the compiler does. The majority of build time for some of those packages is still running configure, testing for things like , which the package provides no workaround when…

Familiarity with make may be part of it, but I picked up that level of familiarity in about five minutes. Common problem: program adds -ldl to linker flags (doesn't work on OpenBSD). Makefile fix: vi Makefile, /-ldl, xxxx, :wq. Done. Autofix: I dunno, but I'm sure it involves a lot more typing. Most makefiles are simple, most makefile problems and their fixes are simpler still. The dumbest thing that could possibly work often does.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#180

Post by ef4 » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 4:45 PM UTC

xaa wrote: post #76

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…

To reply to point three, which is the only one not containing an ad hominem... There exist several larger OSS projects, such as Apache, Boost, the Kernel, etc, which accept contributions but are also curated. Thus they represent sort of hybrid between cathedral and bazaar. People who use these projects know they are getting some (varying) standard of quality. I think these sorts of projects -- often shepherded by som…

Those are essentially ESR's original, canonical examples of "bazaar" projects. They're not middle-of-the-road. They're precisely what he meant by "bazaar".