Thus spake Jason Thorpe ("JT> ") sometime Today...

JT> On Friday, June 20, 2003, at 12:44  PM, Lennart Augustsson wrote:
JT>
JT> > Well, my mozilla rarely run more than half an hour when reading email.
JT> > Lately it often crashes the kernel when it dies.
JT>
JT> Have you filed a PR?  I certainly haven't seen one.
JT>
JT> (BTW, everyone can expect me to beat this issue until the horse is
JT> runny pulp.)
...[and other similar comments]...

Holy cow.  I cannot believe the undertones of what I am reading here,
for they are, at the very least, uncharacteristic of what has hitherto
the status quo for this group.

Has a new planet appeared and not been properly astrologically
initialised, or some such?  It might as well for all the discord
which has shown up of late.  At least it might explain a great deal.

One of the things I have always enjoyed about NetBSD vs. most of the
other communities is that there has been a spirit of quality vs. quantity,
one of do-it-right vs. do-it-fast, and one of co-operation.  This appears
to have turned into the status quid, and this is a shame.

I can't even bring myself to ask "interrogative: wtf, over..." on this
one, as I can't fathom any good reason for why the people involved don't
appear to care, so I'll just express what I have.

I'm grateful that the SA and SMP work went in, since it was necessary.
Any further comments I may have are probably irrelevant, other than that
of late, with 1.6T/i386, xfs dumps core after xscreensaver returns and
renders my xsession mostly inoperative, and no matter how hard I try, I
can't get a USB console to save my life (not to mention I can't get the
kernel to dump core to tell me where it died), things which, while mostly
orthogonal to the issues at hand, might be associated with the SA
problems.

I'm sure that running cdparanoia + gogo + oggenc at the same time
has something to do with my system crashing, but there, again, I
don't get a reliable core dump so can't tell if it's SA related or
not, and hence am reluctant to file a PR until I know what's
going on.  [I'll keep trying]

I'll also be honest in stating that programming for/with threads is
completely mystifying to me; it seems to me an exercise in implementing
kernel-level complexity into userland programming, but that's probably
my ignorance showing.

In any case, the stance of "learn about it and fix it yourself or shut
the hell up, or go away" rather grates against my better judgment, as
it translates loosely to "Go Foul Your Self", with appropriate substitution,
and as a user, even one who would be killed by the minotaur were the kernel
the Labyrinth, that's not even remotely acceptable, even if the project
is a volunteer effort.

It seems that the statement that "All operating systems suck" is beginning
to take on an air of truth, and that's a sad state of affairs.  Even
sadder is the message such a stance is sending the user base of an OS
which might otherwise have a chance of holding on to its niche.

				Peace,

				--*greywolf;