udev reorders assignment [was Re: Solved Debian update - keyboard responsive, Lennart Sorrenson not so much]

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Nov 02, 2011 at 10:52:05PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> I guess I should have said Berkeley CSRG brain damage -- those were
> the people that designed the socket interface, for BSD (Berkeley
> Software Distribution).
> 
> The sensible way of addressing devices, including networking
> interfaces, would have been through inodes named in /dev.  See how
> Plan 9 does it -- eg. /net/ether0.  Why invent a new name resolution
> mechanism?  And a whole new API to deal with things using those names.
> 
> The socket stuff is a lot of warts on the side of UNIX.  Very useful
> warts, I admit.

Yeah out of all the devices, networking does seem to be the only one
that doesn't use the 'everything is a file' concept.

> Old time UNIX purists don't like BSD and many of the extensions it
> added.  They don't have the elegance of 7th Edition UNIX or Plan 9.
> But they did add functionality that is very important.  BSD was the
> first UNIX with support for paging, for example.  (I've been using
> UNIX heavily since 1975, so when I say old time, I mean it in that
> scale.)
> 
> All of this is only of historic interest now.  BSD won a long long
> time ago.  It is good enough.  I read Plan 9's marketplace failure as
> demonstrating that doing things right isn't enough of a win for folks
> to change.

Yeah BSD won, and now I would say it appears to have lost.  I think
Linux has won.  In terms of supporting hardware and new features BSD is
so far behind Linux these days.  That wasn't the case in the past.
You don't see commercial software vendors deal with BSD anymore (they
used to), not they only deal with Linux out of the "non proprietary"
unixes.  Not sure that's the right way to seperate solaris/aix/hpux
from linux/bsd.  BSDi was pretty proprietary as far as i remember.

Have you seen BSD on a cell phone?  How about a 100000 CPU supercomputer
cluster?  a 2048 cpu single system image monster?  Linux runs all of
those, so I do think Linux won at this point in time.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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