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.
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.
Moderation in BSD Section (OT) (Score:3, Interesting)
Boy, that looks like moderation is working for me. But, perhaps there was some lag in this effect. Also, I give a -1 Anonymous modifier. You might try it. (Granted, it would be valuable if modifiers and thresholds could be made per section or dependent on the number of comments, but beggars can't be choosers.)
The issue, I believe, is that troll patrol is done in large amounts by the slashdot admins who have infinite moderator points. As was shown
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
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
Will it be picked up by Open/Free? (Score:4, Interesting)
Kudus, that is a lot of dedication!
An honest question (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:An honest question (Score:4, Informative)
If it compiles, it ships (Score:2)