NetBSD gets New sysctl Infrastructure 44
jschauma writes "NetBSD's Andrew Brown has committed a complete rewrite of the kernel's sysctl infrastructure. To test these changes, he cross compiled 150 kernels for 30 architecures to see where some problems might come up. Additional information can be found in Andrew's email to current-users."
How to develop and test: (Score:4, Insightful)
That's dedication. Kudos.
An honest question (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:BSD Makes The "B" Team! (Score:5, Insightful)
Moderators are selected from the Slashdot community, and so have the same biases. Six months ago I would have said that the Slashdot BSD section had a trolling problem. I think it's pretty clear now that Slashdot itself is a good part of the problem.
Slashdot has taken the attitude that the BSD community is responsible for cleaning up the problem via moderation, and failure to do so means that the community doesn't care. Since the community doesn't care enough, the reasoning goes, BSD really is, in some sense, dying and not worth saving. But this makes two assumptions that are easily shown to be false:
This ignores the asymmetry of the situation. A crapflooder with a dialup connection and an idle hour or two can post dozens of messages. For this, several community members have to use up all of their weekly (if they're lucky) mod points, knowing full well that the same misfit can come back and do it again minutes later.
There aren't that many more trolls or crap flooders in the more popular sections but there are a lot more moderators, so no one has to blow their entire allotment of mod points dealing with miscreants. (And I might note that all the complaints about trolls and crapflooding here indicate a community that would deal with the situation if it had the mod points to do it.)
The fallacy of this belief was brought home to me not long ago when I was metamoderated "unfair" twice in succession for down-moderating obvious trolls in the BSD section. And, as many of us have noted lately, there are an increasing number of irrelevant postings and even blatant trolls getting positive mods. Once again, the supposed self-correcting nature of moderation fails for lower-trafficked sections.
This is actually just the tip of an iceberg which threatens to smash Slashdot into a chaotic free-for-all; I don't think the BSD section is likely to be an isolated case for long (if this is even the case now). Just skim through the postings on nearly any technophile (i.e. geeky) subject, and see how little interest there is for true "News for Nerds" any more. At least the half the posts will be "Who the hell thinks this is interesting enough for an article?" or "Hasn't this been done before?" There is little moderation and it can take some time before the trolls and crapfloods get mopped up.
On the other hand, each tidbit from the SCO or RIAA affairs gets many hundreds of highly-moderated "Ain't it awful" posts, and at least for the first several hours obvious trolls get squashed in minutes. (This despite the fact that very little is newly Insightful or Informative any more on thse subjects, or even much left that is Interesting.) I'm sure that Slashdot gets loads of ad impressions when they run these stories, however, and perhaps the cynics who claim that this is the reason Slashdot runs them are right. But that's irrelevant; the fact is that as a result of these stories Slashdot's content is getting softer and softer, and therefore the average Slashdotter is more likely to be only a camp follower of the technophile community, driven by peer influence rather than an actual passion for computers and technology.
This is all grossly off-topic (except in the sense that Slashdot is a proper topic for a posting on Slashdot), and I expect some Offtopic moderations as a result. But over the years I've seen Slashdot becoming a bloated caricature of its former self, and this seemed as good a time as any to speak up.
Re:BSD Makes The "B" Team! (Score:1, Insightful)
For some reason, people want to reply even when they _know_ it's a troll. I've seen this first hand; I wrote the Gentoo Zealot Translator and that always gets stacks of responses. Some people are just touchy.
M
Re:Moderation in BSD Section (OT) (Score:3, Insightful)
Of 23 comments currently at score 0 or above, perhaps three have something relevant to say about the sysctl subsystem in NetBSD, and only one of these has any technical content. Around half of the Score 0 comments are trolls. I'd estimate that now, a full day after the article was posted, only about half of the needed mod points have been expended.
Yes, downrating AC's eliminates much of the noise, but it also eliminates a significant fraction of any useful content. I don't consider it a solution.About a year and a half ago, before the trolls got the upper hand, it wouldn't have been at all surprising to have the author of something like the sysctl rework post several responses (usually as an AC), and a fruitful technical discussion would ensue. Such people now don't bother, even when someone like me bothers to tell them that there is a story on Slashdot about their project.
Moderation is too little and too late for this situation.
Here's another way that moderation can create a hostile environment: it is frequently used to enforce the majority view or to suppress dissent. (Just ask anyone who tries to say something even remotely positive about Microsoft.) Thus it has a lot to do with the development of a peer-pressure-based herd mentality. There are as many posts as there ever were, but in my humble opinion fewer and fewer of them have anything interesting to say. The Slashdot take on a given subject is often so one-dimensional that it is almost entirely predictable. I blame moderation for this.
For a BSD example, consider what the accepted Slashdot wisdom is concerning the BSD license: it allows code to be "stolen" and tied up inside proprietary systems. Consider this recent post [slashdot.org]. I'll not bother to refute it here; see my response to it. My point concerns the fact that it got upmodded four times (and if you spend some time going through the rest of the discussion you'll see that it's hardly an isolated case). This kind of Slashdottiness is just another example of how moderation is broken and simply adds to the frustration of groups like BSD fans rather than helping clear the air for them.
Well, that's enough commentary on this for this year. (And at this point I'm really not expecting there to be a next year; Slashdot has become of marginal use to me, with its BSD hostility being only a minor factor but a pretty stark example of what's broken.)