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Message-ID: <19981216084649.H10788@acheron.middleboro.ma.us>
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1998 08:46:49 -0500
From: Mason Loring Bliss <mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us>
To: Mirian Crzig Lennox <mirian@xensei.com>
Cc: netbsd-advocacy@NetBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Sun jumping on Linux bandwagon
References: <199812121158.DAA11187@cue.bc.ca> <m3lnk9p6fg.fsf@trantor.cosmic.com>
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In-Reply-To: <m3lnk9p6fg.fsf@trantor.cosmic.com>; from Mirian Crzig Lennox on Tue, Dec 15, 1998 at 02:10:43PM -0500

On Tue, Dec 15, 1998 at 02:10:43PM -0500, Mirian Crzig Lennox wrote:

> I don't... but considering what Suns get used for these days (huge
> honking servers) someone should be emphasizing the fact that NetBSD
> has an excellent NFS implementation, while Linux's NFS is lame (so
> lame that Linux people even admit it's lame.)

Hm... Last I checked, -current's NFS implementation had some bugginess.
I assume nothing has changed, although I haven't tried it in a while. My
last results were that without throttling my NFS transfers, a process
writing anything significant to a remote disk would hang such that only
rebooting the system would kill it.

When last I played with NFS on a GNU/Linux box, NFS worked like a charm.
At the least, I didn't have to kill my NFS performance to keep things from
locking up.

I guess I don't see the benefit of NetBSD's technical merit here.

> NetBSD doesn't quite have the hype potential that Linux does;
> we just have to get by pure technical merit. :)

I wonder how long that will last with Core falling apart while concurrently
alienating potential developers. While it's far from the ivory-tower purity
of the BSDs, there are *so many* people running Linux that things that are
blatantly wrong are bound to be fixed with some rapidity.

Sorry if this seems like anti-advocacy, but I've been disappointed with
several things related to the NetBSD project lately, and I've invested
enough time and feeling into NetBSD that I feel let down. I'd like to see
NetBSD thrive, but it ain't happening now, and I don't see any trends that
indicate that it will happen in the future. Our Core team is dwindling, and
the rest of us are doing nothing to promote NetBSD. There *are* people who
are trying to improve things, but I can't see how *anyone* is going to be
able to break through the ennui and inertia gripping the project.

[steps down from soap box with a disgusted sigh]

-- 
Mason Loring Bliss..mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us..acheron.ddns.org/mason/
"In the drowsy dark cave of the mind dreams build their nest with fragments
  dropped from day's caravan."--Rabindranath Tagore..awake ? sleep : dream;