OpenBSD 4.4 Released 235
Linux blog writes "The new version of OpenBSD is available for download. There are lots of nifty new features to try out including OpenSSH 5.1 with chroot(2) support, Xenocara, Gnome 2.20.3, KDE 3.5.8, etc. Machines using the UltraSPARC IV/T1/T2 and Fujitsu SPARC64-V/VI/VII are now supported. It seems amazing to me that they keep delivering these new results on a six-month release cycle."
KDE version (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:3, Insightful)
It was flamebait on several counts, the first being FreeBSD is not anything like Linux. Kernel, filesystem, hier, SMP, licensing, and general philosophy are greatly different.
I personally think Theo de Raadt is a great project leader, even if he leaves a bit to be desired in tactfully dealing with situations. He's a bit abrasive in way House, MD is abrasive. I think Linus Torvalds is an ass but if I were to use that a basis of running down his work, then I too would be guilty a flamebait.
The rest of the OpenBSD criticisms are simply there to troll, nothing substantive at all. SMP has been there for quite awhile.
Please let people spend their mod points how they see fit even if they don't agree with your viewpoint.
Thank you and let's all try to make Slashdot a better and more interesting place.
Re:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:4, Insightful)
They're significantly behind Linux in many areas, but don't mistake optimization for specific workloads as obsolescence. Performance sucks once you hit userspace, but most OpenBSD machines spend almost all their time in the kernel, routing and firewalling, tasks for which they are quite competitive with Linux.
Re:KDE version (Score:3, Insightful)
My guess is they care more about mature, audited code than something that's top-of-the-line by .1 version.
Re:Congratulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. I'd really like to like OpenBSD. Technically, it's superb. It's smooth, polished, well documented --- it's got a level of consistency that most Linux distros can only hope to dream of. The kernel is well designed and fast, with excellent hardware support. System setup is consistent and well-thought out. Above all, it doesn't confuse easy-to-use with easy-to-learn --- everything is as simple as possible without oversimplifying, which makes it a joy to admin.
But then, every time I try to use it, I run up against the OpenBSD developers, who are an arrogant bunch of elitist assholes. In a couple of years, on and off, I think I've seen Theo make a civil reply to someone *once*. Maybe twice. No, I'm not kidding. When you see someone ask what looks to my untutored eye a reasonable question about VMs, and the head developer replies publicly with the words 'You are full of shit' and nothing else (apart from a complete copy of the original message, no snipping), there is something very wrong. Most of the other devs are nearly as bad, and of course there are hordes of groupies who assume that if the people in charge are okay with personal abuse, then it's alright for them, too.
Despite this, the actual operating system is definitely worth checking out if you're interested in what a well-designed Unix actually looks like. Linux can learn a lot from it.
Re:KDE version (Score:3, Insightful)
3.5.9 is included in 4.4!
Re:Congratulations (Score:3, Insightful)
In short: exhaust your reading and searches before asking questions on the lists. The OS is free, but developers' time is limited.
And that justifies arrogance and being an asshole?
We must be living in different worlds.
Re:Congratulations (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, you and I (we) must. OpenBSD is not for the faint of heart, not for the n00bs, not quite for granny (but if she's asking questions on a OpenBSD mailing list, there's something seriously wrong with the way you set up her rig, or seriously wrong about your understanding of her computer understanding, or whatever). For user-friendly answers, the *BSD documentation is very extensive (try the FreeBSD handbook, most of which translates to OpenBSDdom or Linuxdom), and there are very, very many user-friendly Linux forums out there; the problems you'll have as a end user will be most probably with an end-user app, and kernel developers don't need to be hassled with such questions. As an analogy, I use to say that one novice user's question about the cup holder to the power users is the power user's question about the parameters to their device drivers.
Not that I'm an OpenBSD developer or any such things, but I think that people who dwelve onto the *BSD realm must be braced for such coups, and must be prepared to RTFM!
Re:Mebbe I should try it some time (Score:5, Insightful)
How is it that these comments are raised again and again with rarely a genuflect towards the possibility that our social norms and our technical norms exist at cross purposes?
It is often pointed out that humans are hierarchical animals. What's pointed out far less often is that we are also polarizing animals. For the most part, it's pretty darn hard to get a community of people to rest comfortably within a dual hierarchy: the polarizers will either succeed in driving the culture toward a political hierarchy, or they will succeed in driving the culture toward a technical meritocracy, politics be damned.
What evidence do we have that people can be effective and polite at the same time? NASA? I think not. When it became a political culture, shuttles exploded.
Is Linus an ass, or does he choose to occupy the niche that has proven viable? Larry Wall has taken a gentler stance toward his position as benevolent dictator for life, and he's not getting much good press lately. Nice guys finish last or at best, five years late.
Every time this subject comes up, there is a lot of chattering from the "How to win friends and influence people" crowd that despite the technical merits of X, it doesn't suit that person's social worldview, as if technical merit belongs in a marriage with popularity and approval.
As far as I can tell from my experience, the majority of PC marriages of that ilk are functionally destitute, yet the chattering never ceases that the world *ought* to operate that way. On what basis? What annoys me most is that this chattering rarely includes even the slightest nod toward justification.
This is another fact about human nature: we seem to have an inbuilt algorithm for determining that certain kinds of opinions can be safely put forward with little or no justification (e.g. "that's just how things are"), and which kinds of opinion can automatically be called to account. In my experience, the hierarchy of what must be fully justified and what needn't be has been pretty much decided on the grade 3 playground.
There seems to be a lot of people out there who are offended to the core that Theo's objectionable personality has been associated with so much durable accomplishment. In my opinion, that's just a bad case of shooting the messenger. Given broad human instincts toward hierarchy and polarization, it was as inevitable as the rise of the spam king having created a zero-cost anonymous distribution channel.
The underlying problem is that there is no reliable chalk line between civility and brown-nosing, and it's hell to police in a project that could otherwise rely on more objective measures. It's kind of like Sudoku. A complete waste of time, but I enjoy it anyway. We've made almost no progress (as a social organism) at efficiently policing the line between civility and brown-nosing, but so many among our ranks seem to prefer sliding down this slippery moss bank over the firm traction of dystopian merit.
Re:Congratulations (Score:2, Insightful)
>> For user-friendly answers, the *BSD documentation is very extensive (try the FreeBSD handbook,...
Sadly these days people do not read documentation, and just expect there is somebody out in the forums that will respond something, not necessarily correct, just in order to make the system work (and no, it doesn't matter how it actually works).
So responding to GP, I assume that openBSD is actually targeted for another world.
Re:Congratulations (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh... Who said that "Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups"? OpenBSD is indeed, targeted for another world, hence the rude answers some non-googling users get on their mailing lists...
Re:Congratulations (Score:4, Insightful)
A year later they implemented prebinding, which means my effort wasn't completely wasted.
Parents don't like it when you criticize their children, even if in their heart of hearts they know the criticism is true. Here, software = children; developers = parents. It's not too hard to imagine nerdy group could be like that.
Re:Congratulations (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. Mabye in OpenBSD land, but here in FreeBSD world, we dont flame people to death. The people I encounter in my travels are never hostile, always helpful, and very non-religious (i.e. you dont have to apologize for the fact you are sending in a patch via Outlook and your favorite windows text editor).
That said, only would the OpenBSD flame this guy [gmane.org] to a well deserved, and hilarious, crisp [gmane.org].
Re:Congratulations (Score:2, Insightful)
Theo is no better or worse than many in this game. His professional demeanor may need serious work, but his (Free and Open) OS doesn't. THAT is what matters most to someone like me... who learned the hard way many years ago to avoid all contact (public and private) at all times with all kerneldevs of all kinds. It's a system and it works very very well. ;)
Besides, the abuse is often a form of triage. If you have a legit issue, then press that issue and ignore the mean sounding ASCII characters. If they have time to draft abusive replys, then you did your job. lol :D
Re:EOL cycle (Score:4, Insightful)
that's not a solution when you have applications processing information, and you switch over while your in the middle of processing requests. In my situation there isn't a single second the system isn't fielding 100's of requests. basicly it involves a hand shake where the client makes a requests and expects an answer, if you switch over the new system won't know the client is expecting an answer so you'd have to re engineer a black box system to do it somehow.
Ever heard of connection draining? You build systems with the expectation that they will fail. Any component at any given point in time should be expected to be broken, because it will be at some point. If your system can't handle bringing down a server for maintenance, then you have far bigger problems than picking a good OS. Good luck to you.