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A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

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Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#251

Post by mcguire »

phkamp wrote: post #114
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…

Windows and Office are actually not examples of cathedrals, because the architectural focus of Microsoft was not on software but on a near-monopoly market. You diagnosis of its qualities are spot on. "ad hominem" means to "attack the man", ie: I single identified man, saying some generalities about identifiable groups is not "ad hominem". And yes, I am a grump old man, and a surprisingly cheerful one at that.

"Windows and Office are actually not examples of cathedrals, because the architectural focus of Microsoft was not on software but on a near-monopoly market."

So, you are defining "cathedral" as "good"?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#252

Post by gonzo »

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…

Started in IT in 1980. I'm 50 this year. First FOSS contributions were in Nov 87 (patches to gcc/gdb/emacs for convex machines). This pre-dates any contribution by ESR, and it enrages him when I point it out. :-)

My company ships quite a bit of FreeBSD (as pfSense). Could have gone linux, but linux is a mess (much worse than ports.)

I think OpenBSD is a mistake, at best it belongs as a group focused on security inside the netbsd project, but of course, Theo got kicked out of netbsd, thus: OpenBSD.

I'm also the guy who appointed Russ Nelson the "patron saint of bike shedding." Just FYI. :-) (None of Eric Raymond, Russ Nelson or Theo de Raat like me much.)

The first time I read of 'Cathedral & Bazaar' I thought ESR was illustrating and contrasting the BSD .vs linux development model. Only later did I understand that he was pointing fingers at GNU/FSF, not BSD.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#253

Post by jeremyjh »

peterwwillis wrote: post #222
jeremyjh wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Commercial software can be distributed through the package managers, though you do have to tell the users to add archive sources for those or they have to provide those packages. We do see some of this being done.

One thing its useful to keep in mind, is that the different parent distributions are more-or-less different operating systems. They don't have differences because they are special snowflakes. Comparing the deployment story for trying to write a package compatible with every Linux distribution to Windows 32-bit applications is not really apples to apples.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#254

Post by etrain »

Serious question for phk: Despite your rant, why do you continue to use autotools in Varnish? Is it because libraries that Varnish depends on require autotools? Or did you simply follow convention?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#255

Post by mcguire »

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.

I hate to point this out, but that is just one of the benefits of the cathedral model: you get to inject alternate agendas into the project. The more bazaar-like a development model is, the less outside priorities factor in.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#256

Post by mcguire »

chimi wrote: post #106
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…

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 suspect that "a lack of cathedral thinking" has absolutely nothing to do with the quality or lack thereof of modern systems. I've seen both well- and poorly-built results from bazaar-like development approaches, and well- and poorly-built results from cathedral-like approaches.

Of course, I may be biased because I've seen more poorly-built results from cathedral approaches.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#257

Post by lmm »

tedunangst wrote: post #183
lmm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

SUA comes with a perfectly good set of X11 client libraries. You can ssh into a windows box and run your window manager from there with no problems (other than why you'd want to)

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#258

Post by mcguire »

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…

"proofs (the cathedral in the mathematics sense)"

Uh, we are talking about the same Cathedral and Bazaar thing here, right? Cathedral in the sense that only the anointed master architects get to make decisions; everyone else does what they're told and keeps their mouths shut; bazaar in the sense that everybody brings whatever they've got and hopefully the good stuff hangs around?

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#259

Post by mcguire »

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.

He's also a little bit fond of personal attacks.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#260

Post by phkamp »

etrain wrote: post #254

Serious question for phk: Despite your rant, why do you continue to use autotools in Varnish? Is it because libraries that Varnish depends on require autotools? Or did you simply follow convention?

The reason varnish uses autotools is that I delegated the build/release infrastructure to somebody else.

From my own time as FreeBSD release engineer I know that task must come with freedom to pick tools and methods, and therefore it does.

That doesn't mean I have to like the choice, but I have respect it, (or take over the build/release responsibility myself.)

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