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Re: network-manager as default? No!



On pe, 2011-04-15 at 08:27 +0200, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le mercredi 13 avril 2011 à 11:39 +0200, Stephan Seitz a écrit : 
> > My first (and last) contact with NM was not a good one.
> 
> This is another misconception about Network-Manager: since version 0.6
> (the first one with which people have been in contact to) was very badly
> designed, the current version must be too.

Back in, oh, 1991, a friend of mine showed me this thing he'd written.
It was a little program that had two threads, one printing As and the
other printing Bs. The screen was full of sequences of As and Bs and he
was so very proud of it.

A few weeks later, he showed me a new version of his program. It still
had two threads, one which would read from the keyboard and write to the
serial port, and the other reading from the serial port and writing to
the screen. Even had some terminal emulation. He spent a lot of time
reading Usenet with it, dialling in to the university modem pool. Pretty
impressive, for an As-and-Bs program.

Then he kept hacking at it, and the program grew and became more
complicated. It got the ability to do real processes, instead of just
two threads. Also, he got it to run different things in each process,
loading the code for them from disk. As-and-Bs had grown into a tiny
litte operating system.

He called it Freax.

It could easily have been considered a joke. It did not even have
virtual memory, never mind core dumps, shared libraries, graphics
support, or networking. And it only ran on i386, not on real computers
like the M68k or SPARC. You pretty much had to compile and port
everything yourself. It was really just a toy, suitable only for a very
small group of people. Anyone who wanted something that actually worked
chose something else.

For years, people would say things like "oh that thing, I tried it once,
but it didn't work on my hardware, it's just a toy".

When he uploaded it to an ftp server the ftpmaster didn't like the name,
and renamed it. You may have heard the new name. It's now called Linux.

Software can get better. Sometimes it's even possible to successfully go
from something built for a very narrow use case (print As and Bs on the
screen) to something that's generally usable for an entirely different
purpose (the world's most versatile operating system kernel). If you've
tried version 1, that does not mean version 2 is anything like it.

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