Very unhappy with FreeBSD 13 MOTD

Trihexagonal said:
Get out a text editor and change /etc/motd:
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If it is a new install of FreeBSD 13 then there is nothing to change, but you can add that file if you like and then proceed to scratch your head.

mark_j the cliquiness I don't like is where they pile into a thread and derail it from the subject instead of just ignoring the thread that they weren't all that interested in to begin with...

To get back on-topic, I'll repeat myself about the proper way motd should have been modernised:
By default /etc/motd text file, as it was. A more complex motd could then be installed via ports/pkg if desired.
 
ralphbsz said:
Nah, OS/360 is about 10-15 years older, and still being actively developed and sold. It still makes IBM an enormous amount of money. And a while ago I heard that GCOS (the old General Electric OS from the early 60s) is also still being sold. Both have stood a longer test of time.
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I'm not convinced it has a market share comparable to Unix (or even DOS for that matter). This certainly doesn't make it dead or unprofitable by any means but it does suggest that it might have gained a foothold as a good system *before* Unix really shaped the IT world. Once Unix (as a design) did come in, everything (with a good success) has seemed to have copied it. Even VMS and NT in a number of ways.
ralphbsz said:
Regarding what "Unix" even means: If Dennis and Ken looked at a modern Unix machine (any flavor, whether it's proprietary or open source, and I'm explicitly including *BSD and Linux in that), they would not recognize very many things. Dennis can't do that any longer; Ken is still around, and last I heard, he used a Chromebook (!) as his personal machine: That is a computer that doesn't even expose an operating system, only a web browser. Claiming that something is "the Unix way" is pretty silly.
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Considering that Brian Kernighan was happy running Windows NT. It is mainly just as a thin client to access a "productive" operating system. So I think it is the same, they are just using Chromebooks as cheap Sun Ray clients. After all, that is all they are really good for. Surely for your own uses, you don't just rely on a Chromebook's local capabilities? You can barely get any good (i.e Diagram) tools for them. Too locked down and weird.
 
tux2bsd said:
To get back on-topic, I'll repeat myself about the proper way motd should have been modernised:
By default /etc/motd text file, as it was. A more complex motd could then be installed via ports/pkg if desired.
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There was nothing to modernise. The bloating did not bring anything other than a lost, of transparency
and simplicity. What sane person can desire that?! Although it may be considered an insignificant change,
it is a very bad signal about the future of FreeBSD.
 
mer said:
Seems like a rather odd, trollish hill to die on. The point about taking something simple and making it complex is valid, but a lot of the rest?
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I'm not taking any position. What I'm saying is, there are posts here complaining and asking about this issue but no one has made the effort to go to the source to find the reason and answer. The reasons and answers lie on the mailing list and irc. So go ask there since no one here has either qualified answer or reason.
 
kpedersen said:
Once I have confirmed, I will just add this to my growing installer script. The number of these hacks have grown more in the last two years than the 10 years before it! Luckily it is still considerably less than the madness that is Linux. ;)
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BTW, the "two years" observation is correct!

P.S. If I can pick an old book, e.g. 4.3BSD/1989, to figure out why "stack was zero-filled ... then it wasn't ...then it was ...", then it's UNIX(‡).
But, if I have to dig in YouTube/Discord to learn how to press ENTER key, then that's something else.
-- Please don't take my words(‡) too literally!
 
Just install a freebsd jail, no packages. And you get sendmail for free. And port 25 gets occupied.
For me that is bad design.
 
bakul said:
I find that hard to believe.
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Quite possible that things have changed. 10 years ago, Chromebooks were not where they are today. I tested them for education around that time, and found them woefully inadequate. Today, a significant fraction (half? third? three quarters?) of professional software engineers I know use them for daily development work. Also quite possible that he uses more than one machine; I could imagine having a personal machine, a professional coding machine, and a professional administrative machine, and different OSes for those might make sense to some.
 
I own a laptop with two cores. It's just good for browsing internet with linux.
The video is integrated so it does not boot any bsd.
My 5-cent, for serious work you need more cores on the cpu and this includes power consumption.
 
It seems /etc/motd is not original BSD or UNIX, at some point NetBSD and FreeBSD introduced it in the
man pages, and perhaps in the system.

That /etc/rc appends a line containing the kernel version string is in my opinion bad design.
 
hruodr said:
It seems /etc/motd is not original BSD or UNIX, at some point NetBSD and FreeBSD introduced it in the
man pages, and perhaps in the system.
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/etc/motd is traced back to version 2 of unix. See https://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/2018-March/014704.html

In fact you can check this for yourself since dspinellis has put most of the unix bits online: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo/blob/Research-V2-Snapshot-Development/cmd/login.s

Search for /etc/motd. The TUHS mailing list archives has other interesting historical tidbits in various messages.
 
mer said:
The point about taking something simple and making it complex is valid
Click to expand...

If the new MOTD "feature" were reverted in 13.1, what would be lost? Who asked for the "feature"?

Those are two questions I had when I encountered the "feature."
 
grahamperrin said:
Which "one"?
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By "feature" I mean the entirety of the change in MOTD from 12.x to 13.0.

The specifics, but not limited to: the service, the template.

I presume that before a developer can add a new "feature" such as this, that there needs to be some manner of documentation why the new "feature" is needed and/or beneficial.

Perhaps if that document were added to this thread, it would be helpful in understanding the reasoning that, frankly, I am having difficulty seeing.
 
I have a debian server running.

/etc/motd does not contain the line with kernel info,
but after login you see first this kernel info.

I think, it must be left to the admin to add the first
line with kernel info.
 
Sure would have been nice if Dell EMC had written what problem they were trying to solve with fsync...

To my eyes, this "feature" looks like a solution without a problem.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
I'm not taking any position. What I'm saying is, there are posts here complaining and asking about this issue but no one has made the effort to go to the source to find the reason and answer. The reasons and answers lie on the mailing list and irc. So go ask there since no one here has either qualified answer or reason.
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The end user should not be surprised by such changes, something FreeBSD used to follow POLA.
The end user should not need to go joining mailing lists to find out such things.
Is this a process issue, a lack of attention to a change log, a view the change was too trivial, whatever I do not know?

Nothing will change now so it is up to the user to adapt.
 
Dell EMC probably wanted to have a commit to FreeBSD, so they chose the MOTD non-problem to fix.
Then their fix was not complex enough, so someone else took it upon themself to introduce a more complex daemon-based solution to a problem that originally did not really exist.

Makes sense now. :)
 
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