[Sigia-l] Re: Findability

[Simon Wistow]

On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 02:42:19PM -0500, Listera said:
> "Simon Wistow" wrote:
> Depends on your scope. Actually, there are many OSes around, tailored for
> many specific tasks, from real-time to embedded OSes.

Having worked on embedded OSs I can confirm that you are indeed right
and they *do* exist. I must congratualte you on your pedentary. Please
have a gold star.

However they could hardly be considered 'mainstream' even if they could
be considered widespread. 

Good to see that you're completely missing the point though.

  
> This is factually wrong on just about every level. The Mac OS X core
> operating system (open-sourced as Darwin) is a complete BSD UNIX
> implementation, derived from the original 4.4BSD-Lite2 Open Source
> distribution. 

I should have been more specific and explicitly stated Mac OS 9. I am
blissfully aware of Mac OS X's heritage, the evolution of Darwin from
the Mach 3.0 micro kernel and the subsequent FreeBSD and NetBSD derived
BSD-like layer on top of it as well but we'll come to that later.

"Factually wrong on just about every level" is possibly a little harsh.
Especially since I was merely simplifying things to avoid being a
technically pedantic bore.


> You can tinker with it all you want and look at your Console
> output till the cows come home. Indeed, there are a ton of CLI and GUI
> utilities to let you fiddle with all aspects of the OS, if you don't want to
> bother yourself.
> Nope. Because, as the Mac OS X case indicates you can have a 'tinkerable'
> foundation *and* a sufficiently articulated, coherent and polished interface
> to it. It doesn't have to be an either/or case.


What I had in mind was actually the applications at that point.
Specifically iMovie which I had some misadventures with recently. It was
fine until I found I wanted to do some thigns which is plainly wasn't
designed to do but which I'd expected from having used other video
editing tools. In the end they were possible but I had to jump through
enormous hoops to do so. 

You raise a good point though, one which I attempted to gloss over with
distracting handwaving. OSX does attempt to marry configurability with a
Fisher Price "My First Interface". However, precisely because of the
fact that it is several parts glued together (Cocoa and Carbon on top of
Darwin on top of Mach) you can still see the join. 

To be honest I don't have that much experience with Mac OS X. Howeverm
as far as I understand it, there is still a noticeable schism between
the BSD part and the more visible Mac-ish part.

For example you can install apps  via fink or the more Unixy "configure
&& make && make install". These tend to be the more Unixy programs such
as Apache and Perl and whatever (yes, I am generalising here but bear
with me). Similarly you can install new device drivers by compiling
kernel modules or recompiling Darwin/Mach. This is just like BSD and
suffers from all the asssociated woes (and benefits) of such
configurability.

Alternatively you can install stuff in the more Mac OS 9 type way of,
pretty much, just downloading a .sit file.  Woe betide if this goes
wrong since there's not much you can do. 

Bizarrely enough I think that the closest there is to a true 'hide the
complexity but allow configurability' interface is the aforemention way
of compiling most (especially Gnu) *nix tools this way. A typical
install file simply says :

% tar -xvzf fooapp-1.0.tar.gz
% cd fooapp-1.0
% ./configure
% make
% sudo make install

and everything is configured, tailored, optimised and compiled for your
particular system and then installed. However if thigns do go wrong you
can see exactly at which step and why. Most of the time this is never
necessary and everything "Just Works" [tm].

This is really all just splitting hairs though. I could have chosen a
slightly different example (such as dynamically typed languages such as
Perl versus statically typed, "Bondage and discipline" languages such as
Java which enforce encapsulation whether you like it or not). 

Simon

-- 
I'm full of borrowed ideas that I have no intention of returning