[ On Saturday, March 18, 2000 at 22:33:18 (-0800), Greywolf wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: more work in rc.d [was Re: rc, rc.shutdown proposed change]
>
> Then you have missed the real point.  UI feel is important.  I'm a
> sysadmin.  I do it for a living.  UI feel is _real_ important to me.

Yeah, but I'm telling you that if you want your career to have a future
you have to be prepared to take on challenges like this every day.  I've
been there and done that for about 15 years now, a good half of the
whole life of all of Unix.  I'm probably not a better sys-admin than
anyone in particular and indeed mayb not even as good as most -- I am
just saying that I learned to complain less loudly and under my breath
about the *stupid* and unnecessary differences between various unixes
and to appreciate the different ways of doing things where there weren't
so may stupidities (at least some of the "stupid" things in Unix were
often driven by the various intellectual property issues AT&T forced to
the table and the need for every new vendor to dream up a new name and a
uniquness for their "unix-like" systems).

> # > And I concur with der Mouse:  To be told that the details of administrating
> # > a system are unimportant is an insult to my career as a systems and network
> # > administrator.
> # 
> # That's not waht I was saying.
> 
> No, that's what we are being told.  "It's all in the subroutines which
> you should never need to look at."
> 
> Now, I have a bit more TRUST in NetBSD trying to do that, but it's magic
> which is definitely on the darker side of gray.

I don't think it was meant quite that way either.  My point mostly is
that not everyone who uses Unix, nor even everyone who uses NetBSD, are
system administrators and certainly it's not possible to have a systems
administrator for every machine out there being used productively.
That's the way it is today and it's not a matter of "dumbing down" the
system to make for a wider market share but simply a matter of making
the system more reliable and easier to use for the existing users.

I can guarantee to you that not all of the users using NetBSD want to be
system administrators and more importantly not all of them should have
to be restricted to working in environments where system administrators
are available to support them.

Even if I were to use NetBSD only as a general purpose programming
platform I'd still end up automating and making easier the system
management tasks that I would be forced to perform.  Surely you're not
going to tell all the other users of NetBSD that they are not allowed to
benefit from the tools and automation that I and others like me develop
for our own use!

Now if you *want* to look into the details of how rc.subr and rcorder
and all the rest work then please do so!

Indeed if you don't want to use some component of NetBSD then you don't
have to do that either (unless you go to work on someone else's system
that hasn't been subjected to your own personal decisions).

> Agreed with everything but the last one.  Do you *really* trust any
> automation to be done right by _every_ script?  Do you really trust
> the third parties to have their order in sync with your system?

Automation is incredibly critically important in anything much bigger
than a one-man, one-machine shop.  Trust in the tools that automate
systems management comes through verification, validation, testing, and
indeed certification.  (Or single-vendor sources, but I don't think many
people, at least in these circles, want that any more!)

> Thank you SO much for working so hard to make my job obsolete.

Don't worry -- the number of systems is growing far faster than
automation can currently reduce the need for skilled system managers.

Personally I hate doing anything mundane more than once especially when
I can see perfectly well a way to automate it.... :-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>