Re: flowtable usable or not

On 03/02/2012 03:44, K. Macy wrote:
>> Apparently you've missed all the times that I've given that exact advice. :)
>>
>> But your analogy is severely flawed. Flowtable was an experimental
>> feature that theoretically might have increased performance for some
>> work flows, but turned out to be fatally flawed. The ports system is an
>> essential part of the FreeBSD operating *system*, depended on by
>> virtually 100% of FreeBSD users.
> 
> Certainly fatally flawed without any user support. Just as many new
> features have been.

Right, but what's your point? "I have this cool new thing, and you have
to risk your network stability in order to help me debug it on a
production network?" That's not how the world works man.

>> Users don't have any obligation to help us debug new/experimental features.
> 
> Correct. However, I'm not sure the analogy is flawed. I am, to some
> degree, guilty of the same sin. I now run Ubuntu and have never had a
> single problem keeping my package system up date, in stark contrast to
> my experiences of slow and nightmarishly error-ridden port updates.

So first of all, apples and oranges (Ubuntu packages vs. our ports), but
yeah, I get it. I use both, and have had the same user experience you
have, on both systems. I work with the ports infrastructure quite a bit,
and I know it's flaws intimately. That's one reason that I wrote
portmaster.

> I
> know there are users who have operated without such problems. It is
> entirely possible that they're simply smarter than I am.

Not necessarily. I have said many times that the ports system has some
really bad fundamental design principles that make users' lives harder,
and unfortunately there is a lot of inertia that prevents change. Some
of this is improving, a lot of it is not.

But, at the same time, a lot of work is going into improving usability,
and I think the situation is better now than it was even just a few
years ago.

> I similarly
> feel no compunction to use a FreeBSD feature (the ports system) that I
> can't rely on.

... and here is the crux of the problem. The vast majority of our
developers don't use FreeBSD as their regular workstation. So it has
increasingly become an OS where changes are being lobbed over the wall
by developers who don't run systems that those changes affect. That's no
way to run a railroad.


Doug

-- 

    This .signature sanitized for your protection