On 1016815672 seconds since the Beginning of the UNIX epoch
Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>
>On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 07:12:00PM -0500, R. C. Dowdeswell wrote:
>> 

>> The other thing to remember is that the `easy to use' parts are
>> maintained by third party vendors.  There is no reason why the
>> NetBSD OS cannot maintain its traditional level of stability,
>> regardless of the GUI developments.  If third party software is
>> stable, then great.  If not, then as individual users we can decide
>> whether to install it.  Given NetBSD's userbase, I do not think
>> that the base system will suffer any loss of stability---even if
>> KDE/Gnome are crash prone and buggy.
>
>True, however, a GUI can and will bring a system down.

Sure, but what I was trying to imply was that all of these parts
are maintained by other projects and our users are under no obligation
to use them.  And said parts if they are not in use will not detract
from the stability of NetBSD as a whole.

I have in fact found on my machine that X is pretty solid and I
have never found an instance where X/Gnome/KDE or any other GUI
app has crashed my entire workstation[1].  But then I'm on port-alpha
using a TGA2 which is not XFree86, so YMMV.  Now that said, I just
upgraded mozilla and other than being unusably slow on this system,
it appears to crash about once every 10 minutes.  So, I don't use
it.

>X does crash, and it's even more likely when you are pushing it really
>hard with a fancy GUI.

Certainly, but there is little that we can do about this excepting
fixing bugs in XF86/the MIT X dist, finding a different vendor for
X or writing our own X server.  (The latter is just there for humour
value.)  X should never crash, but it is a program and hence there
will be bugs.  Some of the bugs will cause it to crash.  I'm not
sure what we can [feasibly] do about this.

>Plus, even if the OS stays up, it's damaging to lose context and have
>applications die because they lost X or lost connection to a front-end
>in X.

Granted.

>So I still think the GUI parts need to be very, very solid.  Certainly
>they need to be better than they are.  It's stupid that X can set my
>keyboard or graphics card in a state that requires me to toggle reset.

I've only had that problem on peecees[1].

[1] except when I was hacking the tga driver.  :-)

 == Roland Dowdeswell                      http://www.Imrryr.ORG/~elric/  ==
 == The Unofficial NetBSD Web Pages        http://www.Imrryr.ORG/NetBSD/  ==
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