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A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

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Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#261

Post by daa »

This comment thread is a bit depressing, but ignoring that.

One of the bits about the piece that has me scratching my head a bit is whether the mess that is dependency management in OSS operating systems (and generally OSS software distribution models) matters _enough_. While I very much share the author's reaction of "can't we do better?", it also feels that optimizing that mess isn't just a design exercise as much as a social one, because OSS isn't really a bazaar but a constellation of connected more-or-less-cathedralish bazaars. And I don't know that this mess is deeply problematic (although the author does find some egregious issues).

Design happens at a specific scale, and some scales reward investment in design more than others. Designing a chair that can be mass-produced is more effective than designing a room, which can't. One could argue that designing a self-contained piece of software (e.g. the Python runtime) matters more than designing a deliberately open system (e.g. the ecosystem of Python libraries), and that the alternative (random competition, forking, etc.) is Good Enough.

[for carbon dating: had my first IT job in the early 80s, as a teenager]

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#262

Post by tedunangst »

lmm wrote: post #257
tedunangst wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

oh, cool. sorry, i didn't know that.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#263

Post by mcguire »

icarus127 wrote: post #168
rbanffy wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder if you bothered to check who wrote that article, I don't think the appeal to authority fallacy will fly here. We are all too smart for that. You arguments should be evaluated for their coherence and, in the end, it really doesn't matter who you are or what you did if you are wrong. To use your example, it doesn't matter if you are Von Braun himself. If you don't bring enough propellant for your descent eng…

The point isn't an appeal to authority, it's that the author is a supporter of open source. Not Microsoft.

That is, unfortunately, rather the point. Microsoft is one of the best current examples of the cathedral. The extent that FreeBSD is not-Microsoft is the exact extent that it is more bazaar-like.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#264

Post by jfb »

jballanc wrote: post #116
phkamp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not even in the same zip code as the point I'm trying to make, which, I guess, sort of makes my point. Nobody says you have to write iOS games using the same methodology as avionics, what somebody is trying to say is that random walk will only get you so far... iOS is a pretty bad example btw, because iOS is very much a Cathedral and has a designer and architect who cares and who is in control. That's precise…

iOS, and most of the stuff that comes out of Apple other than the hardware, does not have a single designer. This is one of the greatest myths that Jobs promulgated. He did not hand down directives from on high. Quite the opposite. He waited for new ideas to come from his engineers, then he would wield veto, but that's all.

This absolutely accords with my experience.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#265

Post by mcguire »

phkamp wrote: post #17
cs702 wrote: post #12

Yes, the bazaar is like evolution: messy, inefficient, and slow. Lots of bad ideas are tried; a lot of them stick around for as long as they provide more value than they subtract; and progress takes a long time. Just as the human body has components that are useless today (e.g., the coccyx), evolving software ecosystems always carry a lot useless baggage. That's how evolution works. But Evolution copes better than in…

... but evolution will also quite happily run you over a cliff which you have been avoided if intelligence were applied. Not to mention the fact that the bazaar is never going to put a man on the moon. And yes, I wrote that piece.

I've seen you mentioning some variant of "put a man on the moon" several times in this thread, apparently referring to the cathedral-like project to do so, along with several comments along the lines of "Microsoft software isn't a cathedral because it's designed to create a monopoly market, not software".

Unfortunately, those statements seem to be contradictory; the United States ran the Apollo program for national pride, to cow the Soviets, not out of some grand desire to visit the moon. The science done by Apollo was secondary, and if you believe exploring space was a primary goal, you are going to have a hard time with the question, "why haven't we done it lately?"

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#266

Post by ucee054 »

I wish there were an English word for Baazaar; we used to have the word Market but now that word means aggregate demand IE the job market not the fish market.

Also I wish we could understand "Cathedral vs Bazaar" as an analogy and stop comparing Notre Dame Cathedral and Istanbul Rug Market in this thread.

"Rug Market" software = I recompile my kernel to upgrade = Debian

"Cathedral" software = the central planning organization sell me my OS upgrade = everything Apple

It should be obvious that Cathedral development can guarantee higher quality. Critical systems get written in ADA and VLISP and run on QNX. You would be insane to to try to deploy a critical system in C++/Ruby on Debian, and, depending on the circumstances, you might get arrested if you tried.

"Rug Market" however can scale to larger codebase sizes, because "Cathedral" costs more per line of code. So "Rug Market" wins, when software correctness doesn't really matter.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#267

Post by flatline3 »

mcguire wrote: post #258
Zimahl wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Huh? No, Cathedral in the sense that:

Everyone brings whatever they've got, and the anointed master architects sift through it, determine the best course of action, redirect known-bad avenues of exploration and possibly anoint new master architects from the best of the candidates.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#268

Post by zvrba »

lmm wrote: post #2

Autoconf is an easy target for these kind of rants, but you know what? It does its job, and it does it very well. The ratio of autoconf to non-autoconf programs on my system is probably 10:1, but the ratio of build problems is something like 1:20. If anyone ever managed to write a genuinely better build system, the bazaar would let it rise to the top; the gradual rise of e.g. cmake is testament to this. Trying to imp…

> The ratio of autoconf to non-autoconf programs on my system is probably 10:1, but the ratio of build problems is something like 1:20.

I guess you're running Linux, right? I'd be VERY interested to see this ratio if you ran Solaris.

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#269

Post by mcguire »

flatline3 wrote: post #193
rbanffy wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Compiling and linking a library for XLC/C++ v7.0:

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/comphelp/v7v91/inde...

Re: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

#270

Post by gabordemooij »

According to Wikipedia The 'Cathedral' and 'Bazaar' are supposed to describe open source project development models. So, how can MS Windows, Office and OS X / iOS be 'Cathedrals' or 'Bazaars'? AFAIK none of them is (fully) open source.

From Wikipedia: "The Cathedral model, in which source code is available with each software release, but code developed between releases is restricted to an exclusive group of software developers. GNU Emacs and GCC are presented as examples."

Sounds more like Android is a 'Cathedral' and Linux is a 'Bazaar' ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

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