A Generation Lost in the Bazaar • Hacker News Board

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#191

Post by yxhuvud » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:16 PM UTC

podperson wrote: post #91

phkamp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you and others cannot even spot any more recent cathedrals is sort of my entire point here...

I held IT jobs before 1990. Might I make the observation that when a software project is no longer able to be maintained by a single person or dynamic duo, it will tend to become a bazaar, no matter how cathedral-like it may have been before, and that the alternative is stagnation. I will cite as evidence two of my favorite programs ever: WriteNow (for Macintosh) an excellent early word-processor written entirely in…

There is a third alternative - split the project into manageable parts.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#192

Post by acdha » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:18 PM UTC

peterwwillis wrote: post #118

phkamp wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Cool. Now if only FOSS would adopt a non-insane way of installing software...

"apt-get install " is about as good as software installation gets

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#193

Post by flatline3 » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:19 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #175

pmjordan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dynamic linking has not changed in substantially interesting ways in the past 10-15 years.

We understand the pitfalls and complications, and can come up with some solutions on how to handle them in a forward-thinking way.

If things break in the future, we can revisit this then.

In the meantime, libtool is one of the most ridiculous time-sinks I've ever had the displeasure of working with.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#194

Post by pmjordan » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:19 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #175

pmjordan wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's just defeatism, not arguing against cathedral-style development. Just because we're likely to be wrong to some degree doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be as close to right as possible.

Anyway, I get the impression that for the original example of libtool, cathedral vs bazaar is the wrong question to be asking. [1] The problem isn't one of design or implementation. It seems a problem of distribution. I posit you could build a simplified, cross-platform library linker via either a centralised or distributed process. The question is rather, could you get everyone to agree to actually use it? Considering the success of clang, I think you'd stand a reasonable chance. (speaking of which, clang doesn't exactly stand out as a pure-bred bazaar-model example; neither is GCC for that matter)

Actually, I think that's what's wrong with this whole thread and the article that triggers it. I'm fed up as anyone with the layers of crap that we're building our software on. I seem to spend most of my time yak shaving because of some legacy decision, not contributing new stuff. In fact, my main output seems to be adapters for crappy interfaces. So while I find myself nodding along with the original essay, I think cathedral vs bazaar has nothing to do with the quality of the code we use all the time. It's a question of having the resources and balls to replace the layers of crap when necessary instead of carrying on piling more of them. Whether or not that's possible is mainly a question of whether the systems you absolutely need to retain are open or not. (and open source software can still be developed cathedral-style - I'm pretty sure ESR considered GNU to be cathedral software)

As an aside, when was the last time the format of .a/.so/.dylib/.lib/.dll files drastically changed on the respective operating system? We change even prevailing processor architecture a lot more often than that!

[1] I'll have to admit ignorance on the specific detail on the problem that libtool solves (inelegantly). I hope that doesn't derail my argument too much.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#195

Post by flatline3 » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

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 BSD for reasons other than technical superiority, and more to do with the politics and ecosystem of software, especially related to lawsuits, uncertainty, network effects and momentum.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#196

Post by justincormack » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

calinet6 wrote: post #82

phkamp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't count the iOS and Android OS'es as cathedrals ? Have you never wondered about their surprisingly coherent APIs and wondered why that was so different from, say, UNIX ? See my other comment about knowing what a cathedral is to begin with.

Fair, but I would describe them more as well-engineered skyscrapers. Or even simply good city planning. They're large structures designed around the idea of flexibility and growth from the outside. Ironically, both of these described platforms have orders of magnitude more functionality in their 'bazaar' app-stores than the foundation itself. The foundation enables the market to work, but in itself it is simply a ver…

Paris was substantially redesigned as a planned city by Haussmann[1]. London is a better example where the street plan is pretty much unchanged.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmanns_renovation_of_Paris

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#197

Post by pnathan » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

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.

A debian system from a user's perspective is so easy to use. It's when I dug into the packaging world that I reeled back in horror and shock.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#198

Post by flatline3 » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #186

hollerith wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

They mostly seem to make a mess while never achieving a design anywhere near as coherent as that of OS X, or as straight-forward as that of the BSDs.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#199

Post by acdha » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:21 PM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #101

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…

Disagree. The bazaar model SUCKS at getting rid of cruft. New stuff gets added sure, but old dependencies never seem to go away. It's just accretion. The prevailing attitude is that "hard drive space is cheap." This inevitable leads to calcification and the perpetuation of sub-par solutions, like auto-crap. It get used because "everything else uses it".

There are many old libraries which have been phased out and replaced in the OSS community. It's not fast but it's pretty good compared to the commercial world where companies like Microsoft or Oracle ship everything without gaping security holes until the last customer stops using it.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#200

Post by csense » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:22 PM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #162

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…

> conflates building the packages and using the packages.

Yes. Much of his poor experience is due to build systems.

Anyone who's developed anything can tell you how fragile and finicky build systems can be.

Since build systems are used by developers, who can deal with complexity much better than "ordinary" users, they tend to be rough around the edges.

They're also unglamorous infrastructure, so volunteers tend not to spend time on them if they're not paid. And they have a tendency to break the entire application if broken, and are often part of the "interface" of the software (since every distro who builds package X from source uses build scripts that rely on for example ./configure with particular options), so maintainers tend to take an "if it's not broke, don't fix it" attitude.

GNU projects in particular -- whose autoconf the author complains of -- have quite a bit of built-up cruft since many of them are very old, and also vital infrastructure of most FOSS OS'es.