A Generation Lost in the Bazaar • Hacker News Board

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#221

Post by toyg » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:56 PM UTC

recoiledsnake wrote: post #157

toyg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much all your arguments about the Cathedral model being superior fail in the face of the most common cathedrals known to man: Microsoft Windows and Office. Their inscrutable beauty is buried under tons of libraries nobody will ever touch for fear of breaking 20 years of development efforts, exactly like what happens in the Unix world. Their move to the 64-bit world was painfully slower than what their fellow m…

>Pretty much all your arguments about the Cathedral model being superior fail in the face of the most common cathedrals known to man: Microsoft Windows and Office. It's been twelve long years that OpenOffice moved from the cathedral model to the bazaar model. And it still suffers from the same criticisms you level against Office and more.

Read the whole comment: i said these are problems every long-running software project suffers from, regardless of being a cathedral or a bazaar.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#222

Post by peterwwillis » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:57 PM UTC

jeremyjh wrote: post #149

peterwwillis wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You mean like by having package managers that are built into the OS distribution that can install the applications you want with a single command?

That's not a software installer. That's a distribution-specific package manager. Huge difference.

Commercial software for Linux typically does not come as a package. It starts with some kind of shell script and shoves itself into a corner of the filesystem (usually /opt/$PRODUCT/), and generally ships all its dependencies and does the work of mangling init to work on whatever distribution it's being shoehorned into. If it's a particularly expensive product it might have a GUI or ncurses installer or configuration wizard.

That's retarded, but it's still better than having a half dozen independent binary formats and a hundred distribution-specific packages.

If distribution managers would stop being asshats they would all agree on a set of APIs that they could support to perform operations in a platform-agnostic way, and software developers could in a free-market way make installer tools that work with the API. So you could have a shitty Gnome installer, a shitty KDE installer, a shitty ncurses installer, and an installer that uses Java just for the hell of it.

Packages are not things which users should ever have to touch. They are a specific collection of meta-information for the operating system to do mediocre actions like removing files, copying files, understanding if it has everything it needs to run some files, and telling you what the hell is installed. Packages certainly are not intended to hold a user's hand or provide all dependencies in and of themselves. But that's what you need if you want your users to be able to just install the damn software.

Solaris DStream packages have this wonderful ability to contain multiple packages in themselves, so you can install one or more select packages, or all of them if you need to. The easiest way to ship your application is to provide all the dependent packages in the DStream, and if you need one, you install it. This works great for Solaris (even if you have a bunch of different Solaris versions), but would be completely impractical for Linux because there's so many damn Linux distributions even if they have the same binary package format.

Most Linux software out there (assuming the kernel version is right and the glibc ABI hasn't changed) will work on other Linux distributions without code changes. But we waste all this time just making it work on other distros after the code has been compiled! Does that seem right to you? That because distributions want to live in a silo and do things their own way, you have to spend hours (or days) finicking with independent distributions just to release a new minor version of your app that everyone can use? For a bunch of really smart people we end up doing some stupid things.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#223

Post by 3am » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:58 PM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #160

Munksgaard wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to what chrisaycock said, phks writings are typically very "lacking" and assumes a certain knowledge about whatever he has chosen to write about. He writes interesting stuff, a lot is implied and/or not very sufficiently explained.

Or maybe, just maybe I don't write for the lowest common denominator, but for people who can think for themselves.

I'm really grateful for you writing this. I don't know if I'd couch it in the Cathedral/Bazaar terminology, but I've had similar thoughts.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#224

Post by etrain » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 5:59 PM UTC

Zimahl wrote: post #190

chawco wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The startup game has tons of formally educated people, and their failure rate is just as spectacularly high, if not higher. In my experience, the formally educated tend to build "science projects" at a higher rate than businesses, when compared to those building "twitter for teens"

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#225

Post by paulhauggis » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:00 PM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #166

cooldeal wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

as long as I can use the term I coined: "open shit"

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#226

Post by wglb » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:01 PM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #43

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…

I'm nodding so hard my neck hurts.

Have you seen redis?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#227

Post by jballanc » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:02 PM UTC

flatline3 wrote: post #206

jballanc wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that ideas flowed as often from "the bottom up" as from "the top down". Yes, there was a vision of the product held by those in charge, but there was also a thriving ecosystem of ideas. Some of the most successful engineers I knew at Apple made a habit of developing things they thought were amazing and should be included in the product. These were not components that were part of the original design. The…

> Coherent vision and a priori design are not the same thing. Apple has coherent vision. Bazaars can have coherent vision (should have coherent vision if they hope to be successful). But that's not the same thing as a Cathedral's a priori design... A priori design can adapt to new ideas. I'd argue that's what Apple did/does, in many cases. Likewise, I'd argue that the truly ad-hoc bazaar development is responsible fo…

If a priori design adapts, then it was never more than a coherent vision to begin with. The notion of a priori design is "we're going to do A, B, and C, and don't even think of changing the plan until those are done". As ESR talks about in his original essay, the "Cathedrals" were mostly developed in chunks. What was different about the Linux "Bazaar" was the way everyone could see and give input to the development along the way.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#228

Post by rbanffy » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:04 PM UTC

papsosouid wrote: post #213

rbanffy wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it make a difference whether ls is part of the operating system or not? It works. And if, next week, I write a better ls, I can install it and use it.

Would you mind simply reading the thread? You are inventing an argument that does not exist. I did not make a value judgement, I corrected an erroneous statement. Nothing more.

I did read it. I just think the "complete OS" think doesn't really make sense. Is it superior because of it? More elegant?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#229

Post by schrototo » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:06 PM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #166

cooldeal wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> a TELEX (look it up if you don't know what that is)

This kind of passive-aggressiveness only reinforces the grumpy-old-man stereotype and makes it really hard to take you seriously.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#230

Post by wglb » Mon, Aug 20, 2012, 6:08 PM UTC

keeptrying wrote: post #178

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.

But that process has a way of ruthlessly culling the herd. Does not seem to be happening in this world of infinite backwards compatibility.