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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!news.kei.com!newshost.marcam.com!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!agate!violet.berkeley.edu!jkh From: jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Why isn't NetBSD popular? Date: 17 Aug 1995 05:23:39 GMT Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 63 Message-ID: <40ujor$8f1@agate.berkeley.edu> References: <DDACyE.CBt@seas.ucla.edu> <40nj98$8g2@news.belwue.de> <40rpge$fta@orion.cc.andrews.edu> <40uan1$4tb@palmer.demon.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: violet.berkeley.edu Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:703 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:4220 In article <40uan1$4tb@palmer.demon.co.uk>, Gary Palmer <gary@palmer.demon.co.uk> wrote: >Whilst working on the 2.0.5 install system with Jordan, et al, the fact >that a nice flashy, hold-your-hands install, might sell more CDROM's >didn't really occur to me. The fact that it may make FreeBSD more popular >IN GENERAL, did. The people who buy CDROM's from Walnut Creek are a fraction Everything Gary says (quite eloquently) here is true. And, in fact, we put far more significant amounts of work into the ftp part of the installation mechanism than we did for the CDROM install. Why would we do that if we only wanted to make a CDROM product? Installing over ftp is a much harder nut to crack (especially if you don't want any intermediate files to hit the disk, as we did) and I did, in fact, have to deal with significant grief from the WC folks who were wondering why it wasn't done yet and couldn't understand why I was putting in all that extra work after the CDROM portion of the installation already worked. I stood my ground because I see the CDROM installation as only PART of the installation. You can also install from tape, floppies, NFS and DOS. Does that sound like a CD-centric installation philosophy to you? Hardly! >The first thing when you unwrap a new goodie to stick on your nice, >expensive workstation is the installer, whether it be a piece of software >or a piece of hardware (as you still need drivers). Having a installer >which is counter-intuitive and difficult to use, or even non-obvious >to the normal ``I've installed DOS, I can do this'' person, just leaves >a bitter taste in their mouth, especially if they throw their arms up in >disgust and throw it back in the bin. Amen. If you look at just about everything I've done, in fact, from the package tools to the ports collection to the installation, it's all aimed at making FreeBSD more accessible and represents a MAJOR part of my philosophy. This philosophy doesn't just stop at the "user land" code boundry. For example, some people often wonder why FreeBSD has bounce buffer support and NetBSD does not. I'll tell you why. It's because I noticed the deficiency over a year ago and said "This sucks! All these people out there with Adaptec 1542 adapters trying to run with >16MB of memory are positively wailing about having corrupted their systems! This is totally unacceptable!" And then I went and practically brow-beat (well, maybe not "practically", I *did* brow beat) poor John Dyson and David Greenman into fixing it right then and there. They're still a little annoyed at me to this day about it, but I make no apologies for standing up for what I felt to be a very critical bit of missing functionality. It didn't affect *me* since I just took my other 16Mb and built a second machine, but it was affecting plenty of other folks and as far as I'm concerned that's the same as having the problem myself. I asked the NetBSD folks at the time why they didn't fix it themselves and they said (quote) "because nobody has volunteered a reasonable fix and besides we don't suffer from the problem ourselves so we don't really care." They're volunteers and they have every right to feel that way, of course, but that's simply not my philosophy and I don't think it's the philosophy of the FreeBSD team. John and David wouldn't have fixed that particular problem otherwise, no matter how much yelling I did. I think that pretty much sums it up. This doesn't mean we're perfect and that all of our users are 100% happy with us, far from it, but we'll keep working steadily to improve the system based on their feedback and it's an integral part of our "raison d'etre" to do so. Jordan