[Haifux] No! No! Don't compile your kernel!

[Eli Billauer]

Hi,


To put it short: I never was much into the ideals of freedom. My 
preference of free software always was because I could alter it to meet 
my own needs. It was easy enough to do for real. And I had this feeling 
that the system was meant to be hacked. It belonged to me. And that's 
fading away, most likely because nobody really seems to care about this. 
Linux is becoming a piece of opaque spaghetti, but it's OK as long as 
yum this or apt-get that trades one bug for another. Spaghetti is not 
free software. Not in any sense.


Shachar Raindel wrote:

>
> And for both issues, if you were a company and not a home user, the
> risks of replacing a major software component with a version that
> haven't been tested and properly integrated with the rest of the
> system would have been far worse than the risks of "root on NFS
> through initrd" and "small part of my hardware isn't supported by an
> extremely outdated system".
>   
Ah, that's my point. I clearly remember playing around with my kernel, 
upgrading it with a gap of several years with a vanilla kernel, and 
guess what? I just booted and all was OK. Would you believe that? When 
did it become so scary make changes in the kernel? And even worse: Why 
do we accept this? What's the practical difference between Window's 
kernel and Linux' if you can't compile one, but don't dare to compile 
the other?

There are many kind of companies. My experience with companies, in 
particular large ones, is that they put stability before anything. If 
you have 1000 running stations out there, the last thing to do is to 
just upgrade everything in one go. The worst nightmare is some rare bug 
which suddenly knocks your entire infrastructure down (Cellcom, 
anyone?). Justified or not, large companies tend to stick to what they 
got for as long as possible. I mean, a lot of end-user terminals still 
emulate DOS-like screens in a window (Israeli railways? Banks?), because 
they stick to the interface they had 20 years ago.

When small glitches mean big money, the top priorities are stability and 
control. Stability means to patch only what you need changed. Control 
means that you know what you're doing, to the smallest detail. "yum 
upgrade" and its apt parallel is losing control completely.
>
> Have you tried Ubuntu recently? If I have package X, and I want to
> tinker with its source files, all I have to do is:
> (...)
>   
Redhat has a similar system. I'm aware of it. It's yet another 
expression of the don't-touch-me paradigm. If you have to make a change 
in the sources, we'll hold your hands while you're doing it. The build 
process can be a piece of spaghetti, you won't understand it, it will 
work only on this specific distribution. And of course, if something 
fails, you're cooked.

But why would it fail? Software never fails. It always lives up to these 
don't-worry promises that everything will be smooth, and you'll never 
need to understand how things work behind the scenes, and therefore it 
can be as messy as ever.
> How do you find information on the web? Who makes your Shampoo? Who is
> providing your Internet connectivity? We are dependent on big
> corporations for our everyday life whether you like it or not.
>
>   
You mean, like Microsoft?

It looks like I'm the only one who want to throw away all those bells 
and whistles and go back to the good old days when you could do violent 
things to your OS and it would still run as if nothing happened. Or put 
simply: When GNU/Linux was stable as a rock.

   Eli

-- 
Web: http://www.billauer.co.il

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