Re: [Fwd: What do people think about not installing a stripped,/kernel ?]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 07:28:18AM +0200, Volker wrote:
> 
> <2ct>
> well, that's the same as the M$ people thought ten years back. "Size & 
> price doesn't matter, so let's waste every Meg we could find."
> 
> Doing it that way in every corner, you'll have a system which requires 
> plenty of Gigs to install in a few years. A debug kernel by default 
> would just be the beginning of a systematic waste.

Actually, your expectations are not really what is this all about.
Debug kernel really helps a lot, especially since there're still lots of
bugs and regressions in something as bleeding edged as -CURRENT.  There
are users who simply ignore follow-ups that read "please rebuild your
kernel so we get more information on the problem you're experiencing".
Oh please, they just don't have time for it, nor desire.  They install
FreeBSD, see the panic, and want to report the problem ASAP, and move on
doing their actual work, whatever they do for living.  We cannot blame
people for not having time to rebuild their kernels.  Still, we're
really interested in many good-quality bug-reports.

> 
> Why do you love BSD? Because it's different? Well, I love my beasty 
> because it installs and runs in small to large size systems. And I love 
> it because it's fast. If you blow up everything, your beasty will get 
> slow, fat and ugly.

I appreciate your magniloquence here, I do feel the same way often, but
actually it's going in the opposite direction: with the release of 5.3,
I hope that quite a few developers start devoting time to optimize and
polish things up, not just bringing new features and functionality in.

> 
> Personally I would not care about a debugging kernel on my disk but the 
> way poeple think (size doesn't matter, price doesn't matter) it's the 
> very first step into the direction of blowing up everything - because 
> size doesn't matter.

You're not exactly right here.  Particularly, take a look at what Dillon
has to say about the whole thing:

  http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2004-10/msg00152.html

./danfe