Comment by seabass-labrax
4 months ago
You still hold the copyright to your patch, and the governance of FreeBSD is so much better now. I know a former FreeBSD core team member who I'm sure would love to see you get finally credit for your work :)
I'd be more than happy to put you in touch - email address in my profile if you're interested.
Hey thanks! I hold copyright like a stack overflow post owner holds their copyright. In reality, the change was maybe 4 bytes, it got wrapped into a “refactoring” commit and tada no need to reference the OG author. I played the same games back then too, so I ain’t even mad.
I will still reach out because BSD dev was a small community back then and we have probably crossed paths!
FreeBSD does seem better directed than it used to be, but if you follow the handbook it still recommends setting up computers like individual special snowflakes instead of properly managed cattle.
Like, if your installation has useful services running on it, it should not also have a customized kernel and it probably shouldn't have a C compiler installed at all. What it should have is backups and a way to stage/test/revert config changes instead of just making them on prod. It… does not do this.
IME if you bring this up you'll just get a hundred complaints from people saying "I built a system to do this out of poudriere and duct tape so it's fine". I guess because the people who know about declarative programming all use Docker.
> if you follow the handbook it still recommends setting up computers like individual special snowflakes instead of properly managed cattle.
Which is a perfectly legitimate opinion to hold. "Cattle, not pets" is an opinion about best practices, not a religious dogma where those who don't agree must be cast out of the community.
That would be how Linux works, but BSDs are a centralized development model where you actually do have to leave if you disagree with the project direction. That and given limited resources, you obviously have to focus them to get anything done.
Besides that, I'd say the current approach is just wrong because it's obsolete. FreeBSD sells itself as a "server/embedded OS", but the assumptions are those of basically someone who owns a single computer at home and makes random sysctl tweaks to because they read on a mailing list it was faster. Which is the kind of person who's an OS developer or a small-business/academic sysadmin - basically someone who loves being on the computer in the first place and wants an excuse to spend more time on it.
But they should've realized that was obsolete by the time Google released the SRE book (which has a chapter about how you should never make manual edits), and certainly by the time virtualization and cloud hosting became common.
Of course, many people still do think it's fun to own a computer with a silly name and make random sysctl tweaks to it, so they're not going to like me telling them it should be boring and impossible to do. At least there's Docker and Nix though.
Fair, but my experience was that automating FreeBSD installs is somewhere between tedious and impossible. And that was a big part in me moving on after so many years.
That's a fair assessment save for the fact that FreeBSD's been an extremely opinionated project since its inception.