> I believe there are more people who want the finer granularity of
> individual startup and shutdown systems than those who want the ease
> (for them) of maintenance of a single script.

There are even more people yet who want Windows.  Shall we therefore
start shipping Windows?

That sounds flippant, and I suppose to an extent it is, but there's a
serious point behind it.  NetBSD has been very well suited to a niche
"market", the individual OS-hacker type for whom "untar tarballs, edit
/etc/*" is all the install instructions necessary.

Recently (= approximately this past year), it seems, someone has
decided that a larger user base is a sufficiently good thing to be
worth dropping the niche people for, and this has resulted in things
like the package system and /etc/rc.d, things designed to make life
easy for the "I don't know computers and don't want to have to" crowd,
the people whose idea of complicated system administration is having to
actually type pkg_add at a shell prompt instead of clicking in a GUI.

Yes, there are hell of a lot more of them than there are of the
hardcore hacker types.

But they're already very well served by Windows, Linux, etc.  Perhaps
FreeBSD as well; they seem to have gone farther towards catering
towards that crowd than we have, from what little I know of them.

I don't want to see NetBSD trying to compete with Linux and Windows on
their own ground, both because I believe it will lose and because it
will mean that NetBSD will then no longer suit the niche I am part of.
Yet that seems to be where it's headed.

>>> 	* As I've said before, please don't start about the "BSD way"
>>> 	  of doing things.
>> Why not?  *You* don't care about it, so those who do have to shut
>> up?
> 	On that path lies Michael Sokolov's Quasijarus
> 	Seriously - rc.conf, posix compatibility, scsipi, bus_space,
> 	pcmcia/usb with the ability to detach devices, IPv6, 64bit
> 	support and a bunch more are all items that were not 'original
> 	BSD', but they are aspects that make NetBSD a better system.

"BSD way" != "only what came out of CSRG", at least to me.  It's a very
fuzzy sort of thing; that's why I haven't been able to provide a clear,
coherent, logical statement of what I dislike about the departures from
it.

> 	rc.conf is no more 'the BSD way', than splitting up rc into
> 	individual subsystem controlling files, but they both intended
> 	to ease administration.

And they do...for some people.  The trouble is, *which* people?

>> Indeed, it may be the SysV shard that finally drives me away from
>> Net"BSD".  I don't know yet.
> I see a distinct lack of directories full of S93bob and K23alfred in
> this new scheme (though I understand they could be generated as an
> option).  So it is no more SysV than it is 'traditional' BSD.

Just as "BSD way" != "CSRG products", "SysV way" != "SVR4 spec".  The
rc.d scheme, as I understand it, has the same basic problems that real
SysV startup scripts do: they make human understanding and manipulation
of the startup sequence significantly harder, for the sake of making
mechanical ditto easier.

>> You mean like how the Project just screwed over everyone who dares
>> to run a system in any way other than "run sysinst, run pkg_add"?
> In what way - are you no longer able to control your systems with
> rc.conf and add your magic to rc.local?

Will there *be* rc.conf and rc.local?  I saw "rc.conf must die" and
discussion of /etc/rc.d.local/ vs /etc/rc.local.d/, which means either
there won't be any rc.conf and rc.local, or the new scheme is being
grossly misrepresented.

> If you run the script that converts evrything into one large rc file
> and leave it that way, how has it screwed you?

Quite possibly it hasn't.  Frank said monolithic rc was gone and
wouldn't be back; I jumped to the (not unreasonable, I think)
conclusion that it was so.  Now it appears it might not be.  I'll
probably set up a crash-&-burn machine and try bringing it up to
-current sometime soon, see how alien the new system feels when I do
ask it for a single startup script.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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