Re: Daemon's Advocate article

[Hiten Pandya <hmp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michel Talon wrote:

> As far as i understand, Greg Lehey is mainly nostalgic about his personal
> project in this article, that is vinum. It is vinum that is left behind by
> recent developments in FreeBSD-5 and soon to be axed if not maintained
> seriously. The reason, as far as i understand, is that most developers 
> have tried vinum and ... loosed files. The result is that they consider 
> vinum is crap and don't want to spend time solving the bugs that Greg Lehey
> doesn't want to solve himself. I don't have any personal opinion on this 
> subject  (i don't have enough disks to test vinum :-( ), but i have an
> opinion on easily accessible stuff: the vinum *documentation*. I think
> that this documentation is horrendous, absolutely incomprehensible,

	Hmm, before this topic turns into a fountain of criticism, I
	would like to say that Greg Lehey did contribute A WHOLE chapter
	on Vinum for the FreeBSD Handbook from his `Complete FreeBSD'
	book.  The documentation explains the underlying concepts of
	Vinum pretty well and how to use it.

	How do I know this?  Well, because I and Greg Lehey worked on
	this doc issue together.  The Vinum in 4.x is far better than
	the one in 5.x, that is from personal experience with the
	software.

	Although, one thing I know that makes Open Source software a
	little hard to accept at first is the usual clause of:
	``the author/insititute is not responsible for any possible
	damage caused by the software.''  With those kind of clauses
	it is sort of harder to push such software in companies where
	you would think the author would at the least answer questions
	about the software thoroughly.


> and if only for this reason, i would never put anything valuable under vinum
> for fear of being unable to restore it in case of problem. I am convinced
> this is number one reason for the poor acceptance of vinum in the community,
> and subsequently the risk of it being axed. Moreover the tone of Greg Lehey
> responses in mailing lists when people were asking help was such as to
> reinforce fear uncertainty and doubt about his software. The moral of this

	Hmm, I wonder what one's opinion would be if another Open-source
	software disk volume manager were to crash badly, and the data
	was lost, would you end up putting that on your cross-list? :-)

> installer is the entrance port to an Operating System for newbies. If the
> installer is the sort of crap that are presently the *BSD installers, you
> cannot expect to attract a lot of people outside of the professionals or
> the enthusiasts. The Linux people have understood this point: it is the
> distributions with easy to use installers (RedHat, Mandrake, Suse) that 
> have grabbed the largest part of the market, not the distributions which
> pretend to deliver a high quality product, like Debian, and begin by
> offering an installer worse than the BSD ones. Remarkably a lot of people

	Ok, the installer is an issue, yes.  But saying that, I know
	people from this list who have long been working up a draft
	proposal of a packaging/package system for DragonFly.  The
	installer is also under the microscope right now.  These are one
	of few issues that we want to get resolved in DFly as soon as
	possible.

		-Hiten
		Hiten Pandya (hmp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)