Re: Technical Differences of *BSD and Linux

Sean Davis wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 03, 2003 at 10:00:48PM -0800, Terry Lambert wrote:

There is a boot option to make them less noisy.

I've had employers who would have liked an option to make the FreeBSD boot less noisy. Unfortunately, what they were actually concerned about was obfuscating the identity of the code they were running, rather than doing the right thing in this area, which would be to flag the types of messages you wanted logged to the console vs. logged to the console log, or the ability to override the verbosity level very early in the boot.

It was possible to do what they wanted, but I was personally on the hook, should a significant customer problem arise in the field, because I was known to be the best diagnostician, so I needed the minimal set of diagnostic information, and a way to get the full set. Knowing that the intent of the change was to be obfuscation, which would make that job harder, failed to motivate me to work on that, as long as there were other high priority tasks on the task list which needed to be done, which were technical in nature, and marketing eye candy.

I suppose if the number of priority tasks had ever drained out of the queue sufficiently long for the work to be done, I would have ended up doing it. Luckily, startups, for some managers, are all about creating crises, and then being seen by the VCs to be masterfully resolving them (e.g. compressing release cycles to once a quarter, etc.), and I never had enough free time to actually be in a position to have to deal with the otherwise absurd request.

• Terry