Venting my frustration with FreeBSD

[Josh Paetzel]

On Monday 04 December 2006 21:10, David Kelly wrote:
> On Dec 4, 2006, at 2:43 PM, Josh Paetzel wrote:
> > If you *do* decide to flame me please take a moment to grep for
> > josh at tcbug.org through the ports tree, or look for PR's with my
> > name on them, or browse through the questions@ mailing list
> > archives looking for responses from me.  I have, and do,
> > contribute to FreeBSD, which I feel gives me the right to
> > complain a bit.  I fully intend to ride the FBSD boat as long as
> > possible, I just can't help but wonder if the slow leaks I see
> > now are serious.
>
> Know what I like best about FreeBSD? That this thread has NOT
> become a flamefest. That FreeBSD users and developers know the
> difference between constructive criticism and a troll. Know how to
> take constructive criticism, and how to ignore a troll. And just so
> there isn't any doubt, Josh's posting is "constructive criticism."
>
> --
> David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
> ===================================================================
>===== Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.

I started and run the local BSD user group, and I've always been 
interested in seeing what the local LUG does, so I read their mailing 
list.  One of the things I've always noticed is that the LUG mailing 
list is one big flame-fest.  In the years our BUG has been in 
existance we've had one thread that was at all hostile, and it was 
the result of someone posting a bunch of political propaganda during 
the 04 presidential elections.  We also have an IRC channel on 
freenode, and just the other day I went to kick someone out for the 
first time, only to find I wasn't on the access list.  (For the 
record, the only reason I wanted to kick them is their client was 
dorked up and caught in a join/part cycle)  What I'm getting at is 
that the FreeBSD community is for the most part terrific.  For the 
record I haven't gotten anything close to a flame from anyone, either 
onlist or off.

To be fair, I should mention the things that I think are awesome about 
FreeBSD.

1) The ports tree.  Not without it's faults, but if you know how to 
massage it properly I think it's the best package management system 
in existance in the open source world....and it's better than any of 
the proprietary ones I've used from commercial vendors too.

2) The documentation.  Chances are, if you want to do it it has 
excellent OFFICIAL documentation.  My hats off to everyone that 
slaves away on the doc team.

3) The filesystem layout.  Simply fantastic.  The seperation between 
the base system and 3rd party apps is a godsend.

4) The ease of updating the base system.  Sure, there have been some 
ugly upgrade paths between major version numbers.  (2.x -> 3.x) and 
the fact that there's no feasible way to get UFS2 without a reinstall 
making 4.x -> 5.x || 6.x somewhat pointless, but even so, 5.x -> 6.x 
is cake, as was 3.x -> 4.x which is impressive.  And minor version 
numbers are of course trivial.

I could go on, but I'm getting too touchy feely for my own good I 
think. :)  

I think I'll add one more thing to my original rant.  Why oh why oh 
why can't we have a journalling filesystem?

I'll also add, I so hope I'm wrong and FreeBSD will be there for me 
for years and years and years to come. :)

-- 
Thanks,

Josh Paetzel