Please forgive me for prolonging this thread..

> sysinst is not an ``old-style text installer.''  It has sane, efficient 
> menus and widgets, and it can display a command's output inside a 
> subwindow.

If sysinst is not an old-style text installer, what is an old-style text
installer?  A shell and some utilities?  Can it display a command's output
inside a subwindow, or does it just use a scrolling area?

>  The Twocows pontificator seems to be confusing ANSI-color 
> and proprietary IBM PeeCee line drawing characters with ``modern 
> installer.''  These characteristics make no useability/friendliness 
> difference whatsoever, and they badly mangle output on many terminals 
> that NetBSD supports.

I think the Twocows pontificator may also have been referring to the fact
that sysinst does not completely configure a system for you, as stated by
Manuel Bouyer.  Also, dude, PC is the preferred nomenclature.

I have seen programs, like lynx, that will use line drawing characters if
they are available, and use normal characters otherwise.  Even the MS-DOS
edit command would detect when it was run on a terminal incapable of
line-drawing characters, and it would use normal characters instead.  I'm
not saying that using line-drawing characters is a goal, but it should be
possible to use them without badly mangling anyone's terminal.

Have you ever installed NetBSD on a PC using a terminal that did not have
line-drawing characters?

>  A long time ago, a Bell Labs hacker developed the 
> ``termcap'' idea.  Then RedHat broke new ground in the so-called-Unix 
> community by throwing termcap's basic sanity out the window, in favour of 
> installers based on old DOS-only ``terminal emulators'' for terminals that 
> never existed---most of them had a terminal called ``ANSI-BBS'' which is 
> what the RedHat and Debian colorful/linedrawing installers seem to be 
> patterned after.  It's no wonder that the same people who used to struggle 
> so hard to get a full-screen editor to work want us to concentrate on the 
> pretty lines and colors.  Speaking as one who has tried to use AlphaBIOS 
> over a serial console, I can only call these architectural decisions 
> embarassingly foolish, but not half so foolish as one who looks at a 
> correctly-functioning system and calls it ``incomplete'' just because he's 
> never seen a system work correctly before.  This type of bogon 
> design philosophy works great for side-scrolling video games based on 
> character-cel glyph blocks like ``Legend of Zelda,'' which is a fine 
> game by the way, but the philosophy has no place in any complex system, 
> or any system accountable for large amounts of money.
> 
> I'd also like to point out that several of the (completely rewritten) 
> RedHat special-installation-disk-partitioners I've used make off-by-one 
> errors in determining the start- and end-points of the partitions.  Not 
> only does this make installation difficult, but if an operating system's 
> culture is incapable of recruiting and training programmers who can 
> answer basic seventh-grade-math-bowl questions like ``how many posts 
> are in a six-meter fence with posts every meter?'', do you really want 
> to trust their programs with valuable data?  
> 
> Why is it that when these Linux/PeeCee-centric organizations review an 
> operating system, they dwell almost exclusively on _installation_, 
> and do not attempt to make observations about the running system from 
> their experiences as I just did?  Is their goal run Unix, 
> or to install Unix?  

I didn't see you make any observations about running a system..
partitioning is usually part of installing a system.  I think places
like twocows just want a piece of the action.  "Hm, many search engine
queries contain the word Linux or BSD, let's catch some of that traffic
for profit."
 
> Maybe we should all take a step backwards, and try to decide whether we're 
> here to write a Unix or here to write a Unix installer.  If we're here to 
> write an installer, we may as well follow Linux's lead by halting 
> innovation on UVM, UBC, LFS, SMP, and ALTQ so that we can devote more 
> resources to designing a desktop widgetset that includes a WordBASIC 
> emulator that we can use in our installer.  It might also help to put 
> statically-linked Perl in /bin and crunchide, and use it to rewrite sysinst 
> from scratch, with some bash and Tcl glue scripts and imlib bindings 
> thrown in---everyone is talking about Perl these days, and it's huge, 
> so it _must_ be the language of the future.  We can either recode all 
> of NetBSD in Perl now, or find ourselves left behind when all the 
> competing distros go to grafical inst's.  If NetBSD doesn't start 
> embracing the new advanced technologies like web-enabled administration 
> tools with .asp's and .psp's, it won't be able to Compete with the 
> installers of other Open Source (tm) Operating Systems.

Linux is further along with SMP, kernel threads and thread-safe libraries.

> I'll tell you one thing for sure:  writing installers seems to pay a 
> helluva lot better than writing operating systems!  Who do we have to 
> thank for this absurdity?

In terms of money, I don't think this statement is true.  If you call
Linux an operating system, remember that it is not centrally organized,
but a collection of separate projects.  The people who work on the kernel,
for instance, seldom care which installer is going to put their kernel
on a machine.

> If installers are really in such demand, it seems to me you'd want to 
> choose the hardest-to-install Unix you can handle, so as to have the 
> greatest boasting-rights.  Then, if someone installs a Unix which is 
> different from the one you installed, you should be prepared with remarks 
> about how that Unix is ``easy'' or ``lightweight'' or ``watered down for 
> the unwashed masses,'' thus proving your superiority.  Given that scenario, 
> I can understand why Linux is so popular, and I can understand why a 
> Unix with simpler, less arcane, and more openly-documented installation 
> procedures is maligned in the same article.  But, why is it maligned for
> being hard to install, when difficulty-of-installation is the virtue 
> that earns users in this community their respect?
> 
> You know what?  It doesn't matter!  Why?  Because the PeeCee is dead!

I've been hearing that rhetoric for many years now.  Sales don't pronounce
the PC dead yet!

> Why do you think NetBSD has been concentrating on the inexpensive 
> interfaces (USB, IDE), on real-time kernel preemptibility (SMP), 
> on the networking stack (IPsec, ALTQ, IPv6), on the key embedded CPU's 
> (m68k, ppc, mips, arm, sh3), on a unified ELF toolchain, and on a 
> cross-compilable build architecture?  Twocows is _not_ part of any 
> sane master-plan.  Don't be reactionary about this.  There are no 
> constructive comments in that nonsense article.  We do not need that 
> writer's attention or approval.  Trust me:  when the shit hits the fan, 
> NetBSD will be the only open project even close to ready for it.

Who's asking Twocows to be part of a master plan?  Who said Linux
developers intended their software to be eternal icons of purity?
When the shit hits the fan, there will still be bored hackers who
need a good time.

> What I'm really concerned about is, what's going to happen to the 
> project's culture when people concerned more with making money than 
> with writing code start wanting to contribute poorly-written junk.  
> I am almost certain it will fork <cough>, perhaps many times, when code 
> starts getting rejected.  People looking to make a purchase only see 
> what you have, not how you got it.
> 
> Then again, as long as the American tech industry completely collapses, 
> we should be fine.

May I be corny?
The vultures want a sick cow to die, the farmer wishes to heal it.

Ben
-- 
Code softly and carry a big debugger.