There is a scene in "Around the world in 80 days" where they run a train over a weak bridge fast enough that the bridge collapses only after they are trough. The current linux way of releases and design reminds me of this. They try to go as fast as they can but sacrifice their ability to step back and rethink the result in that process because whatever they just did and what is now behind them is crumbling in some chasm behind them. This may leave them on some remote place, stranded.
The fast pace makes abandoning of old structures mandantory, as they would serve as the 10. circle of hell for configuration management when you try to keep all the balls in the air at once. You would get stuck in the web. As one linux advocate had put it, it is fun to simply code away and not care. You have to not care or you would not get anything done.
On the other hand, if something you threw overboard in, say, version 1.3 suddenly would be better now due to changes in the infrastructure, you have a hard time getting it back.
What i see on the *BSD side is the other approach which goes slower, but is more steady. How long did it take for the 4BSD scheduler to be officially replaced by the new one? Would some ten-fold increase in code complexity of it be worth the benefit of the improved performance and the time to get it as solid as the simple one? (This is only an example, I want to state that before I get flamed for this.) On Linux, you likely can not go back 2 or 3 versions because the rest of the other subsystems you used to depend on have changed and what did not change for you now depends on some aspects of the new solution. A good engineer tries to avoid that.
Thinking of this, would it be a good idea to strip the disc block elevator from the I/O queues for SSDs? These were put there to reduce head movement for "spinning rust" type of storage, but I think on SSDs they will more likely add latency to the IOPS.
Yes, I do not like the current way of the Linux development, and I prefer the BSD way. But on the other hand I see how it has come to pass, and I can not blame them.
How is that as a closing statement from my side?
