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.  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.  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?  

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.

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?

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!

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.

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.