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A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

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Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#181

Post by phkamp »

papsosouid wrote: post #177
phkamp wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The fact that OpenBSD put any users and source-code holders in USA in direct violation of USA (stupid!) laws on spectrum access is the context you are missing here.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#182

Post by brlewis »

phkamp wrote: post #165
doktrin wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

I read ESR's essay. He was protesting how hard GNU makes it for outside contributors such as himself. Somehow the essay got construed as open source vs. closed source, and ESR pivoted to align with the popular interpretation of his essay. I've never read the book (someone would have to give me a really good reason), but I assume it doesn't focus on GNU.

You're calling a ot of people out on using Microsoft as a cathedral example, so I assume you want the original bazaar-vs-cathedral reading of the paper. But if you do that, how can autoconf be a bazaar example, when it's GNU software?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#183

Post by tedunangst »

lmm wrote: post #69
secure wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear your statement about build problems as soon as someone does not use autoconf quite a bit. However, in the past I’ve had the opposite experience: Trying to port software such as Apache, PHP or bacula to UNIX systems such as SGI IRIX, I always ended up writing a simple Makefile to compile the software instead of putting up with the multitude of autotools-fixing that would have been required. I reported one or tw…

>However, in the past I’ve had the opposite experience: Trying to port software such as Apache, PHP or bacula to UNIX systems such as SGI IRIX, I always ended up writing a simple Makefile to compile the software instead of putting up with the multitude of autotools-fixing that would have been required. I reported one or two clear issues upstream and they have been fixed, but until the relevant fixes arrive at the pro…

a) From the looks of things, "make CC=gcc-arm" should just work.

b) It's an X11 window manager. It's not likely to compile with SUA, and I doubt any amount of autofucking is going to change that.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#184

Post by anonymoushn »

jballanc wrote: post #113
anu_gupta wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that a lot of people (myself included) think that Snow Leopard is a better OS than both Lion and Mountain Lion.

I wonder why you think that? I suspect it might be related to the focus on "consumer-centric" (as opposed to geek-centric) features. That is one interesting side-effect of the bazaar model: it's great at building what the majority want. If you are trying to build something that nobody is asking for, you can't beat the cathedral model! ;-) I will tell you, though, that Snow Leopard missed its ship date by 8 months (of…

The software that replaced Spaces in Lion is so painful to use that I just don't use virtual desktops on OSX any more. I basically only moved to Lion because Snow Leopard would not work on my new machine.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#185

Post by papsosouid »

phkamp wrote: post #181
papsosouid wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

The fact that OpenBSD put any users and source-code holders in USA in direct violation of USA (stupid!) laws on spectrum access is the context you are missing here.

Even if we were to throw common sense and reason to the wind and pretend that is even remotely close to the truth, it would in no way explain your behaviour. You outright stated that "the way the world works" is accepting closed source garbage that can not be verified, debugged or fixed. You think the way the world works is compromising security and stability for convenience. And you belittle people who do care about quality, as if it somehow hurts you that such people exist.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#186

Post by acdha »

hollerith wrote: post #86
acdha wrote: post #55

The odd part about this “get off my lawn” article is that PHK has already shown how to fix the problem: Varnish is both a very good tool and one which has gotten attention and compliments for rejecting obsolete convention (e.g. relying on the VM, requiring a C compiler to be installed on a server, etc.). I would love to see autoconf massively simplified or outright avoided for most projects and the best way to do tha…

>Linux has flown past FreeBSD . . . because Linux distributions like Debian provided a clearly superior experience for the overhall system by rejecting the decades of accumulated hacks Debian contains tons of accumulated hacks that I wish would be rejected.

I won't disagree with that entirely but the Debian / Ubuntu community has shown considerably above average willingness to make major changes to fix that.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#187

Post by ori_b »

jballanc wrote: post #151
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.

While Apple would certainly like you to believe that the image of iOS sprang, fully-formed, from the mind of Steve Jobs like some sort of medieval cathedral, the reality is anything but. In fact, much of Apple's success is due to the extent to which it functions like a confederation of very well funded startups. Cupertino is very much a bazaar, wherein a shopper with very refined tastes (Jobs, for example) can pick a…

I'm going to drop the cathedral and bazaar analogy, because I don't feel like debating the exact meaning of the terms.

It seems to me that quality is about having someone on the top who is willing to give direction and vision to a project, instead of having every person who scratches their own itch full influence. Contributors are great. But letting everyone pull in their own direction doesn't lead to something that feels well engineered.

PHK seems to be calling this vision and cohesive design (a-priori or not) the "cathedral model". I agree strongly that for a project to work well and feel "high quality", it needs some source of a unified idiom.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#188

Post by flatline3 »

jballanc wrote: post #93
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…

First: Have you ever looked at a plot of people for/against mariage rights for gays vs age? I suspect that the clear divergence does exist, but may not mean what you think it means... Second: I worked on OS X. In fact, I worked on Snow Leopard, and the start of Lion. What's interesting about that, is that Snow Leopard was the last version of OS X developed according to the "Cathedral" model. Also, while the Snow Leop…

I also worked on OS X, and I think you're misinterpreting "Cathedral" vs "Bazaar", especially given your later definition:

> The only thing that distinguishes the Cathedral and the Bazaar is whether or not there is one single individual in whose head the only valid vision of the completed project exists.

Core OS and related groups has long consisted of VERY different teams each working in their own fiefdoms with their own methodologies. There was a somewhat coherent vision overall, but everybody achieved it in their own way, with very mixed results -- OS X has some tremendously terrible code. Security framework, Installer team, mDNS, anything related to Server ...

To be honest, I'm not even sure what your point actually is.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#189

Post by acdha »

randallsquared wrote: post #150
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority wanted to have scrolling inverted?

No, the majority wanted to stop it from continuing to be inverted, as it has been for decades. If you do a significant percentage of your computing on a touchscreen, having the touchpad work the same way is really, really nice. After a few days of Lion, I switched all my other machines to do scrolling the same way. Now that I'm moving to Linux instead of Mountain Lion, I was happy to note that I can swap the up and d…

You are aware that the same “simple command“ is a checkbox in the OS X system preferences, right?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#190

Post by Zimahl »

chawco wrote: post #148
chimi wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people, especially around here, eschew college education in the computer sciences, because you can get a job without it and you can build a website without it, but I really think the decline of formal education in computer programming concepts has led to a lack of cathedral thinking. Of course, I'm biased, because I have such a degree. However, when I compare what I build to what is built by a busine…

I'm going to go ahead and strongly disagree on this first point -- I've seen no correlation whatsoever between education background and propensity for strong system design. In fact, my background is mathematics with very little formal CS-related education and I'm firmly in the cathedral camp. I really think it is a matter of exposure -- at one time all anyone ever saw were cathedrals, and so that was all anyone ever…

my background is mathematics

You are a terrible example because you come from a formal background of a hard science. Even worse, you come from one where proofs (the cathedral in the mathematics sense) are required or you aren't taken seriously.

The parent was talking about joe schmo off the street or the high school wunderkind who is building "twitter for teens" or "pinterest for social good". They are just slapping it together from the get go without thinking about any aspect of the design. Eventually they'll have to hire the formally schooled to come in and clean it all up, if they actually get anywhere with it.

Which makes me wonder, if more formally educated individuals were in the start up game would the failure rate be so high as it is now?

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