On 14 June 2010 01:59, David Tweed <david.tw...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 12:38 AM, Connor Lane Smith <c...@lubutu.com> wrote: >> On 14 June 2010 00:16, David Tweed <david.tw...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> One of the issues to consider is that what computers are used for >>> changes with time, and decisions that one may classify as "the >>> suckless way of doing things" at one point in time may mean that it's >>> not effectively useable in some future situations. >> >> If the system is sufficiently modular it should be relatively future-proof. > > I meant to suggest that design decisions and architectures might need > changing as new use cases come to light rather than that a single > design should be future proof-ish, and that this is in fact desirable. > However that means that saying something is "suckless" has to be > implicitly qualified with "for current needs". To pick a really simple > example, consider the changes to booting that happened since the > arrival of netbooks. What was once a relatively rare process, with the > corresponding "suckless" design being to keep things simple, has > become something where sub 5s booting is wanted, which requires more > complicated techniques. That's not to say that old-style booting was
I think the Unix philosophy is quite future proof, also with parallelization in mind. So if new requirements arise then it's rather a question if a new tool or new way of combining them is needed. Regarding the boot speed I disagree. I think short boot cycles can be achieved with rather more simple init systems than the insanity people got used to like the SysV style Debian insanity. A simple BSD init based or even more simple system always outperforms any "smart" technique in my observation. Cheers, Anselm
