Re: returning to BSD [was: Removing /etc/nologin on shutdown]

["Ian D. Leroux" <idleroux%fastmail.fm@localhost>]

On Wed, 26 May 2010 01:51 +1200, "Chris Bannister"
<mockingbird%earthlight.co.nz@localhost> wrote:
> > On Sun, 23 May 2010, Ian D. Leroux wrote:
> > Who is returning to BSD after a long exile in Debian
>
> I was wondering why you are leaving Debian?

I remember getting a similar question when I switched to Debian four
years ago; at the time I was looking for hardware support (of recent
PC-class hardware) and a quiet life (my computer was sucking up too
much of my time).  The Debian project has assembled a fine system
that solved both those problems for me (with UTF-8 throughout and
painless, consistency-checked software installation with sane
defaults).

That said, I'm trying to move back to BSD for at least the following
reasons:
- It's home.  I cut my *NIX teeth on FreeBSD 4.x and spent most of a
  year on NetBSD 2.x.
- Transparency: If I want to understand how something works (or why it
  doesn't) on a NetBSD system, all the source is right there.  Of
  course, I can always download the source on Debian as well, but it's
  not present by default, has no canonical location like
  /usr/[pkg]src, and doesn't map in a straightforward way to the files
  in my system because everything goes through the magic binary package
  manager.  Debian does binary-by-default very well, but I'm more
  comfortable with source-by-default. 
- The base/pkgsrc separation: Having a minimal but self-sufficient,
  consistent, centrally-coordinated system with clearly-defined
  boundaries.  This in turn allows ...
- Documentation: In my experience, NetBSD comes second only to Plan9
  for precise, concise, comprehensive and comprehensible manpages.
  And Plan9 is a much simpler system to document.
- Simplicity: Debian does the right thing nearly all the time, but
  when it doesn't the explanation and the fix tend to involve fairly
  sophisticated mechanisms designed to almost never fail.  NetBSD does
  the right thing most of the time, and if it doesn't do what I want
  the explanation and fix usually involve a binary whose behaviour is
  simple to describe, a straightforward shell script or a
  well-documented
  static configuration file.  Compare grub to bootselect, the apt-get
  infrastructure to make and mk.conf, runlevels to /etc/rc ... I have to
  spend more time tweaking the system on NetBSD, but I find the
  experience less frustrating and more instructive.
- Community: I have had good experiences with the Debian community,
  but it's intimidatingly large.  Smaller communities have their
  problems, but they're much easier to join.  Note that a mere few
  days after signing to netbsd-users@, I've been invited to submit a
  patch.  That doesn't make me a member of the community yet, but it
  makes it much more likely that I'll invest the time to earn that
  privilege.

Most of those arguments ultimately boil down to familiarity rather
than technical superiority, but I'm just a grad student running a
personal PC, so I can afford to pander to my tastes even when I can't
defend them.

Besides, I've always had the dream that someday I'd have enough time
to contribute to the open-source software that I use, and that makes
me want to use software I'd like to contribute to.

Hope that answers your question without sounding like a troll,

Ian Leroux
Who has changed his mind on these questions before and reserves
the right to do so again.