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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Nov 03, 2011 at 09:16:21AM -0400, Russell Reiter wrote:
> Not trying to sound trite here. But the way I see it is, if someone
> spend's a great deal of time learning how to create a programming
> interface, that's what they want to do, start creating applications
> via that interface. If your only tool is a hammer, pretty soon
> everything starts to look like a nail.

Or you use the hammer to make more tools.

> In terms of capacity planning, keeping an architecture, soft or hard,
> small and closed enough for current capacity while still preserving
> future development forking, seems to me to be almost political and
> hardly scientific. In fact it is the dynamic relationships between the
> various people on the committee's planning for development, which
> charts that course of development. There are a number of people on
> this list who discuss those political aspects of Linux in a great deal
> of depth.

I am impressed at how well Linus has managed this gigantic project,
especially without any idea where it was supposed to be heading.

> For me I'm grateful that IBM chose not to completely close off it's
> complex architecture while those manufacturing using reduced
> architecture sets did close theirs, by way of fee simple. You have to
> pay to play.

x86 PC or powerpc?

> I didn't even know there was a Unix until well after 1992. That was
> when I bought the assembly language rom cart for the TRS-80 my
> girlfriends dad had bought for her. I tried to teach myself 6808
> assembly language. Boy did that make my head hurt. I never did do what
> I was intending to do. Now, these years later, I know I was trying to
> write an API.

Well I dealt a bit with QNX on the Unisys Icons in the early 90s, which
is certainly unix like as far as the user interface at the command line
is concerned (but nothing like it internally).  And when I saw a "Free
unix like OS" on a BBS that had usenet feeds (SLS 1.03 specificly),
I just had to try it.  Many days at 2400 baud later...

> I like history it helps to plan for the future.

As long as you don't try to predict the future.

> How did Minix fit into things? Was it a precursor for Plan 9? Isn't
> that what Linus Torvalds was working from when he started writing the
> drivers for intel chipsets?

I believe he did start with minix and replace a piece at a time until
he had replaced it all and had a basic working system, which he then
added more features to.

> I understand that Minix was developed, maybe not entirely but at least
> in part here in Toronto at UofT.

It's possible although I doubt it.  It was mainly developed (at least
originally) by Andrew S. Tanenbaum who is at Vrije Universiteit in
Amsterdam, so it seems unlikely.  Now porting it to other architectures
likely could have been done by various people in various places.

> Thanks I appreciate your comments.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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