Re: FreeBSD 7, DragonFly's status

[Vincent Stemen <vince.dragonfly@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 07:13:25PM +0000, Bill Hacker wrote:
> Matthew Dillon wrote:
> >	I spent more time then I should have perfecting the low level
> >	infrastructure, trying to build a base upon which all the other
> >	work could occur.
> >
> >						-Matt
> >
> 
> It may seem so in the rear-view mirror, but had you NOT done the 
> low-level infrastructure, AND the 2+ year code-clean-up of what was 
> adapted from Free (and other) BSD, nothing else would be working as well 
> as it does.
> 
> That was time that pays back with long-running and ongoing dividends.
> 
> JM2CW,
> 
> Bill

I agree.  I really appreciate that you spent the time perfecting the low
level infrastructure first.  That is one of the reasons we have switched
our projects over to DragonFly.  I am tired of systems that are like
a sky scraper built on top of a rickety foundation.  That is one of the
reasons Linux became so unstable that we left it after being on it for
at least 10 years, and again with FreeBSD.  When FreeBSD-5.x became so
unstable that we could not even complete NFS backups without the server
hanging, and stayed that way for months, we left it and went to NetBSD,
which is still a pretty nice system, although not as feature rich in
a lot of ways.  We did not wait for years for FreeBSD to stabilize like
we did with Linux (Hard lesson learned) before discovering it was not
going to.  Of course, I hope that does not prove true with FreeBSD.
FreeBSD still seem to have a more professional development community
than Linux.  However, we have since switched to DragonFly because of
architecture, planning, developer attitude, and emphasis on clean code
and stability.  

I believe a perfected low level infrastructure should pay off in the
long run with accelerated development without loosing stability.

I have been impressed with the progress of DragonFly so far, especially
considering the comparatively modest number of developers.

Vince