On Tue, Mar 16, 1999 at 05:58:49PM -0600, seebs@plethora.net wrote:
> In message <199903162341.PAA06680@Cup.DSG.Stanford.EDU>, Jonathan Stone writes:
> >Seriously, though: could it be there's a European vs US dichotomy
> >here, due to SysV's dominance in the European market, versus BSD's
> >early and longlasting technical superiority in the rest of the world?
> 
> I dunno; I actually like some of SysV's technical decisions better, and I
> suspect we wouldn't have 'rc.conf' if someone were to point out how similar
> it is to some of the stuff my SVR4 box had in /etc.  Real Sysadmins don't
> rely on pansy config files, they edit rc by hand.

That's silly.  Plenty of developers -- including plenty of us dyed-in-the-wool
Berkeley Bigots -- think an SVR4-*like* rc/init mechanism would be preferable
to the old-fashioned rc/rc.local and that's it way.  The present rc.conf
system is a compromise; several other solutions have been proposed internally
but none have really satisfied enough people to be adopted.

I wish some of the people arguing here would wake up and realize that where
there's a genuine technical issue, most (all? as far as I know, at least!) of
the developers are perfectly willing to consider doing what System V did --
or what Plan 9 did, or what Multics did, or... you get the point.

Where there's a fundamentally religious issue, like whether to ship Emacs
instead of vi, or change root's shell from /bin/csh to /bin/sh, or
make ps(1) take the System V flags instead of the Berkeley flags -- there
I think you'll find that a lot of us oppose gratuitous changes just to be
like "most Unices" when the Berkeley tradition is clearly otherwise, and
it's basically a user-interface issue.  We're Berkeley Unix.  Our user
interface is that of Berkeley Unix.  If you want System V -- not only do
you know where to find it, it'll be simple enough for you to make NetBSD
act like it, if you want to.  But by default, we're BSD Unix and I for
one thing we ought to stay that way.

I suspect many other developers and users feel the same way.