FreeBSD, Who is it for?

[SDK Chan]

Imagine having a production machine go down with no good way to restore things other than a complete reinstall from scratch or a good handle on ZFS snapshots. If it's a non-production machine that you don't mind spending time on, sure, go ahead, practice, make mistakes, and learn. But if your job is on the line, you gotta make damn sure you can put things back exactly as they were if the change you introduce does not work out as intended. And if you can't do that, just leave the machine alone.

I thought making backups before breaking things is a natural step to do.
Sure you can use ZFS snapshots, but machines don't having snapshot capabilities could do a complete sync of the machine with rsync for example.
Another step would be doing a backup file before editing the source in the case you really break something.
If you update you could create a boot environment backup in case.
With the necessary precaution steps breaking things shouldn't usually be that harmful as you should be able to restore the state previour to changes.

 

[astyle]

I thought making backups before breaking things is a natural step to do.
Sure you can use ZFS snapshots, but machines don't having snapshot capabilities could do a complete sync of the machine with rsync for example.
Another step would be doing a backup file before editing the source in the case you really break something.
If you update you could create a boot environment backup in case.
With the necessary precaution steps breaking things shouldn't usually be that harmful as you should be able to restore the state previour to changes.

My take is, if you notice that people get hesitant and cagey about making changes on a production machine, that reflects the amount of confidence they have in their own backups and ability to recover from a mistake.

Common sense is nowhere near as common as you'd expect it to be. Yeah, having backups that you can actually use is 'common sense'. But reality is, it does take a lot of resources to create a usable backup. So maybe the 'common' part of 'common sense' is a bit of a misnomer.

 

[blackhole]

What should they expect, systemD creeped in to much into linux ecosystem, and the systemD less distros create stub-files to satisfy pkg dependencies, these stubs should actually be harmless.

More or less yes.

Debian (and by extension Devuan) breaks an upstream source project into component packages, so instead of foo, you have libfoo, libfoo-dev, foo-utils, etc, etc.

Package XYZ is then compiled with sensible defaults to suit "most" use cases. One of those is e.g. "foo support", so it pulls in libfoo but not the rest of the foo packages.

Thus you get "libsystemd0" - a tiny systemd lib, but not the whole of systemd nor systemd installed as init (PID 1).

Then upstream "foo" may also package systemd unit files - useless without systemd - which take up a few KB.

The zealots object to this and cry foul, with respect to systemd files in a distro which is supposed be systemd free. All attempts at reasonable rational discourse usually fall flat in a "community" which is more than two thirds non technical zealots and frequented by conspiracy nuts and right activists.

Personally, I don't see the point in taking a systemd Linux and stripping out systemd - better to start with something without systemd in the first place. The whole thing seems geared towards serving a certain type of incapable user. The same kind of person who downloads a rebranded web browser with some privacy / securituly claims.

 

[blackbird9]

I will answer the OP's question the only way I know how, which is by posing the following job interview question. Salary starts at $500K, realtime trading systems at top hedge fund.

Job Interview Question.

If W is the set of people who genuinely like windows, and B is the set of people who like freebsd, then we can state with some confidence that W and B are disjoint sets (assuming W is not the empty set, which is an unproven assumption).

If S is the set of people who like slackware (or "sl4ck3rs"), then the sets B and S are said to be overlapping sets.
Now, let P be the set of Perl programmers, which is overlapping with B and S.
Then the intersection of the sets B, S and P is the set L, or "l33ts".

Now consider the set M which is the set of people who like the song below. The set M overlaps the set L.

Your question is: how many people on the planet are in the set that is the intersection of the sets M and L.

Hint: you are allowed to listen to the song before giving your answer. You must provide your solution within 3 minutes.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftZRDa5RHsA

P.S. I might have fibbed about the job description and salary

 

[RypPn]

The answer is 1 and I can even name his nick