[H-GEN] Re: Unix vs NT (religious war :-)

[Martin Pool]

(Note reply-to: being general at humbug.org.au vs Martin Pool <martinp at mincom.com>)

Anthony Towns wrote:
 
> On Tue, Aug 03, 1999 at 04:09:39PM +1000, Frank Brand wrote:
> > On Tue, 03 Aug 1999, Martin Pool wrote:
> > > Perhaps what we need is not so much GUIs, but wizards.  Hear me out:
> 
> I more or less agree with this. I even think I can cite the Debian MTA
> postinsts as an example of where this is a useful thing (install sendmail,
> smail or exim and watch the questions it asks you. "Are you an Internet
> site, are you a sattelite system, etc"). Now this is admittedly far from
> perfect (it's still far from obvious which selections a newbie should
> make in some cases), but it's much easier than hacking sendmail.mc or
> sendmail.cf yourself.

Yes, the Debian installation is intermittently excellent.  However, I
think:

 * Unfortunately, some people find the same text less scary when it's
   presented in a dialog window than on a text screen. 

 * A "back" option would be good.

 * It's a bit unfriendly to make people configure every package in
   sequence -- suppose I just ticked Apache because I thought it'd be
   cool, but I wasn't actually going to use it yet.  I still have to 
   answer ten questions before we can run.

> > Is it a specialist system for highly skilled (and in Humbug we
> > are talking a lot of extremely well skilled people, not all mind you there are
> > Doug and I to balance you out :^>) systems specialists OR is it a system to
> > rival Windows in all its versions as a system for all men and all seasons.
> 
> Having one system for all men and all seasons isn't necessarily a Good
> Thing. Having multiple different systems all incompatible to some degree
> or another is a good robustness technique: if one's not good enough for
> what you want, there's still a chance another is; and if one has some
> horrible flaw, chances are the others don't.

A point of the OS robustness paper cited on this list a while ago is
that one can take advantage of diverse operating systems to build more
reliable networks: if you have two mailservers, with one running
sendmail on AIX and the other exim on GNU/Linux then it's much less
likely both will fail at any time.  So, let a thousand flowers bloom and
a thousand schools of thought contend.

> But there does have to be a balance --- someone has to know how to get down
> and dirty into the system. And, ideally, the difficulty curve shouldn't be
> all that steep.

Bill Joy said he wanted Java to allow "easy things to be easy and hard
things to be possible".  I won't bore you with my idea of Java's graph,
but it seems like a good philosophy to me.

--
Martin

========== gratuituous microsoft story follows:

           A sysadmin at, ahem, a "large jeans manufacturer" was put
           in charge of Exchange on hundreds of NT servers.  He
           dutifully logged and reported dozens of bugs, system
           outages, etc., to MS support, as the thing crashed and
           burned like the Hindenburg II. After a few months of this,
           Microsoft decided to act on the problems. The solution was
           simple: they sent a letter to his boss saying he was a
           troublemaker.

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