Re: Emacs vista build failures

[Johannes Weiner]

Hi,

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: Johannes Weiner <address@hidden>
>> Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:37:17 +0200
>> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>>      address@hidden, Miles Bader <address@hidden>
>> 
>> To be honest, I couldn't give the slightest about w32.  It's a pile of
>> crap that should have never seen the light of day, all political issues
>> left aside and I, FWIW, would not consider it when designing software.
>
> Such arrogant nonsense can only be forgiven if it's spoken out of
> utter ignorance.  Last time you took a good look at a Windows system
> was probably in 1998.  Wake up! a lot has changed since then.
>
> Nowadays, w32 systems don't fall short of Gnu/Linux in any aspect:
> stability, usability, user-friendliness, etc.  And the current trend
> in Gnu/Linux systems to mimic the Windows UI, feel, and touch bring
> more and more the worst parts of Windows to Gnu/Linux systems, to the
> degree that in a very near future they will be indistinguishable,
> anyway.

I can use a stripped-down version of GNU/Linux.  I neither use KDE nor
Gnome for example.  A lot of the time I chose to a bare screen session
on a VT without running X at all.  But I could start a full-blown
desktop environment at an instant, if I want to.

This modularity I have not seen in Windows so far and I doubt it will
get there soon.

On top of all this modularity, people now start to put blocks on top of
it that make it look like Windows or OS X, maybe.  But I can still chose
which blocks I want to use.

If people like using a complete desktop GNU/Linux distribution that
mimics Windows' look and feel, that's their choice.  And it's only ONE
FLAVOR of the possibilities you have.

> And if you are interested in OS architectural design, then Linux is
> simply boring: a huge monolithic kernel that came straight out of the
> dinosaur 70-s.  Whereas modern Windows systems are in this respect
> everything the Hurd wanted to be: microkernel with many services
> running in user space.

Linux is a fully-functioning, widely tested and bleeding-edge technology
operating system I can study the source code of.

What is your point?  Advertising a blackblox by telling me what cool
stuff it contains (you just have to believe!)?

> Too bad it is under-documented (but then who has ever heard about, let
> alone seen, good internals documentation in the Free Software world?).
>
> Posix is only one way to go, it is not the only way.  Saying I don't
> care for anything but Posix is like sticking to a single programming
> language: you will be a poorer programmer, because some paradigms
> evade you completely.

That is certainly true.  And I wouldn't mind seeing other good
approaches to operating system design.

        Hannes