Re: "Towards a New Strategy of OS Design" revisited

[Marcus Brinkmann]

At Wed, 26 Oct 2005 23:08:32 -0400,
"Jonathan S. Shapiro" <address@hidden> wrote:
> Thank you, this is very useful. I was looking for something that an *end
> user* might care about, but these are worth talking about too.

The end user question is important, and we need to answer it.
Unfortunately, it's not something that's typically at the fore-front
of a GNU programmer's mind ;) As you said, we are developers and
mostly write software for other developers, not for end users.
 
Still, I think that some goals for end users can be extracted, while
others can be reasonably assumed to be taken for granted, and yet
others we might be able to think up on our own.  More on that later.

> Unfortunately, I started typing comments before I finished reading your
> note. I think that we are in basic agreement, but I decided to keep the
> comments because (a) in some cases I have suggestions for how the goals
> might be framed more precisely, and (b) in some cases you were
> excessively generous and gentle. :-)

I agree, and I am happy you made your comments, because more precision
is urgently needed.  It's easy to scrutinize Thomas wording, and my
interpretation of it.  However, I think what is important here is to
catch the spirit of the text, and what the intentions were (even if
worded incorrectly or sloppy).  I think that your reframing has
preserved that spirit very well (and if anybody has any doubts, I
_will_ bother Thomas to explain what he was smoking ;).

Thanks,
Marcus