At 9:24 AM +0100 11/8/01, Alistair Crooks wrote:

>  Looking at your original piece of mail, I concluded that either
>  you subscribe to a Bernstein-like philosophy that, once a piece of
>  software has been written, it cannot be amended in any way except
>  by its author (strange for a piece of software released - eventually
>  - under a BSD licence), or you were looking for a fight.

	Neither.  The software has obviously been released under a 
BSD license, so anyone is free to do pretty much anything they want 
with it.  However, this is a case where I believe that the original 
author happens to know best how to implement the code that he wrote.

	In addition, every single argument I've seen so far 
supporting the mount option or /etc/fstab solution I have found to be 
exceptionally lacking in understanding of the depth and nature of the 
problem.  I've heard Kirk's arguments on this matter, and I find them 
very compelling.  Indeed, I believe I've been able to come up with 
some of my own arguments supporting his position.

>  It would appear, from the text quoted above, that it's the latter,
>  as you are now trying to play a "my BSD is better than yours" kind
>  of game, which is inappropriate for a technical mailing list. (FYI,
>  it's also the wrong mailing list - this mailing list should be
>  devoted to "discussion of issues specific to NetBSD on Sun's 32-bit
>  Sparc based machines (NetBSD/sparc).")

	No, this is a case where I believe FreeBSD has a better 
implementation, presumably because Kirk has had a more direct hand in 
how it has been implemented -- including the use of tunefs instead of 
mount and/or /etc/fstab.  I believe that it is entirely possible to 
do a careful code review of both the NetBSD and FreeBSD 
implementations and to come up with a synthesis that is almost 
certainly better than either by themselves.

>  If you don't have anything technical to contribute, please take your
>  prejudices to the approriate forum.

	If anyone is prejudiced here, it would seem to be you -- NIH 
and all that.

>  Obscure technical bit: personally, I like the /etc/fstab option
>  *MUCH* better than a "boot -s; tunefs ...; mount -u /" for changing
>  the setting of softdeps.

	Either way you have to unmount the filesystem in order to 
operate on it, and if you're talking about the /usr filesystem (if 
it's separate) or the root filesystem, you have to drop down to 
single user mode and come back up or reboot.  What is the practical 
difference here?

>                            It would seem that Solaris 8 uses a mount
>  option too.

	Just because everyone else does something stupid, does that 
mean you have to as well?  If I told you that everyone was jumping 
off a bridge without a parachute, bungie cord, or any other safety 
device, would you do the same?

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>

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