Apparently I’m not the only one who’s noticed this Linux feature.
...The reason given [...] at the time was that the kernel had more burning issues and bugs to address.
Of course it did. There were so many subsystems being repeatedly rewritten that there was never-ending breakage. And rewriting working subsystems and breaking them is far more important than something that might improve the desktop right?
(Con Kolivas, quoted in APC magazine)
It's an interesting article. I don't know how fair the rest of it is (though some of the political machinations he describes are familiar from the time when I was an active(ish) kernel developer and gadfly,) but the OH NOES SOMETHING WORKS WE'D BETTER BREAK IT!! commentary is right on the money; I spend a not-inconsiderable part of my work time finding and working around places where interfaces have changed for no reason every time we try to roll in a new kernel version, and if I wasn't getting paid do to this I'd probably be spending my time trying to backport drivers and put a usb stack into Linux 2.0.28 (the kernel on Pell is 480k with scsi drivers compiled in, and the 2.6.x kernels I'm maintaining at work are 1480k sans scsi drivers) instead of keeping up with the bleeding edge of Linux development.
(-- via Francois Souchay)
Comments
Comments are closed
And it’s not just the kernel. Every single release of SuSE changes the names things. Removable media used to mount under /mnt. Now it mounts under /media. The mount names for things changes often.
Novell added, in 10.2, it’s own flavor of menus to use rather than the one that comes with KDE or Gnome. The look and feel of the desktop changes for no reason other than to keep up with changes at M$.
I think the most common phrase at developer meetings must be “oooo. Shiny.”