On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 09:40:57PM +0100, Marc Espie wrote: > On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 03:28:29PM -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote: > > Their challenge is that they need to provide choice so they > > have what they call reasonable defaults. > > No, they don't need to provide choice. At least not that many. They decide > to do so. That's most of what's wrong with OS stuff these days. Too > many choices. Too many knobs. Every day, I see people shoot themselves in > the foot, not managing to administer boxes and networks in a simple way, > making stupid decisions that don't serve any purpose. > > ACL, enforced security policies, reverse proxy setups, user accounts, > network user groups, PAM, openldap, reiserfs, ext3fs, ext2fs... > so many choices. So many wrong choices. > > At some point, the people who package the software need to make editorial > decisions. Remove knobs. Provide people with stuff that just works. > Remove options. Or definitely give them the means to do the trade-off > correctly. > > Okay, it's a losing battle. I'm an old grumpy fart. > > Okay, a lot of IT people are just earning their wages by managing the > incredibly too complex setups we face nowadays (and not screwing too badly > in front of a multitude of stupide innane choices). > > Linux is the `culture of choice'. Provide ten MTA, ten MUA. Twenty window > managers. Never decide which one you want to install, never give you a > default installation that just works. Cater to the techy, nerdy culture > of people who want to spend *days* just making choices. > > We try not to be as bad, to provide default configs that work, and not > so many choices.
I agree with you that secure/sane defaults are very important, they are a big pro for OpenBSD. Featurism violates KISS and we all know that KISS is the only way to handle ever growing complexity. BUT choices are important as well, everything else is "world domination tour" aka dictatorship (and not the good kind). Imagine not having a choice in hardware, wait don't just imagine look at the high-end graphics card market. Sorry, but I just couldn't leave the "one size HAS TO fit all" alone without any restraints. Regards, ahb
