Re: Why is Desktop NetBSD a threat to NetBSD?

[Hauke Fath <hauke%Espresso.Rhein-Neckar.DE@localhost>]

At 7:56 Uhr -0700 14.2.2009, Andy Ruhl wrote:
>> ...without support for hot-pluggable devices (on NetBSD at least), as does
>> Gnome. The controversial HAL bits are used by both Gnome and KDE, AFAIK.
>
>This is not directed at you, it's just a general question:
>
>When did hot pluggable devices become part of Andrew Doran's original
>email? I don't see him mentioning this anywhere.

Andrew stayed pretty general. I think it's an implicit issue, since anybody
coming from an MS Windows (or Macintosh) background will expect these
things to just work.

> I think this
>discussion has come up because people assume that it must be supported
>since "everyone else" supports it.
>
>I just don't see why it's such a bad thing to start without this. It
>never occurred to me that the "kitchen sink" is the only reasonable
>way forward.

I could go into detail (and might, eventually, for the sake of discussion),
but in a nutshell: One of the two things that brought about the conversion
of the NetBSD lab machines @work to Debian Linux was the endless stream of
users' unhappiness and resulting need of support caused by NetBSD's (non-)
handling of pluggable mass storage. amd(8) can only take you so far.

The second issue, and the straw that broke the camel's back, was lacking
support for heavyweight Linux Java applications (read: Matlab >= v7).

        hauke


--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)