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Linux Is the Largest Software Development Project On the Planet: Greg K-H (cio.com)
sfcrazy writes: Greg Kroah-Hartmant, the Linux superstar, delivered a keynote at CoreOS Fest where he gave some impressive details on how massive is the Linux project. Kroah-Hartman said the latest release (4.5) made two months ago contains over 21 million lines of code. More impressive than the amount of code, and what truly makes Linux the world's largest software project is the fact that last year around 4,000 developers and at least 440 different companies that contributed to the kernel. Kroah-Hartman said, "It's the largest software development project ever, in the history of computing -- by the number of people using it, developing it, and now using it, and the number of companies involved. It's a huge number of people."
I'd say having a university programming project become one of the biggest operating systems in history, and with the vast number of contributors and collaborators, all for a project that you can freely download, yeah, that's a pretty impressive badge of honor.
If Linus died tomorrow, he'd be viewed as one of the pantheon of great computer innovators, not so much because he produced anything in and of itself unique, but rather because he transformed the *nix ecosystem, and lead to greater penetration than I suspect Unix's original creators could ever have imagined.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In electrical engineering circles we call these two aspects of testing 'verification' and 'validation'. Verification is verifying that the code matches the specification. Validation is making sure that the specification is really what we want in the first place.
Fortunately, us real engineers demand complete specifications, and when we find mistakes in those specifications we make sure they get fixed. Doing things in your haphazard land of writing code by the seat of your pants must be stressful at times.
You're making one big mistake, and that's equating software development with construction. It's not. Software has achieved automation of construction of final artifacts based upon detailed specs: it's called compilation. What programmers do is much closer to creating specs than to construction according to specs. People writing recipes are not cooking.
Well, you HAD more mod points, but they are in some binary log format, and good luck finding them.
Sigh. I get it no one likes systemd, blah blah. But believe it or not as time has moved on, the binary logs are quite resistant and the format is fairly simple in nature. Likewise, most emergency boots now include journalctl. A simple journalctl --file some_log_file will allow you to browse ad-hoc any file you toss as it so long as it is uncompressed (which as an aside, if you compressed syslog you'd be no better at this point) Even the ones that journalctl --verify says are corrupt. The corruption most of the time post version 205 is that an index was not written. And even if that's not the case, you can force it to display what it can read.
I think the binary argument is a hollow argument at this point. The logs are pretty good at not becoming corrupt and tools are pretty much included now in most recovery tool sets. I see it as no different as say when a PostgreSQL database becomes corrupt. And if you really just hate the idea of binary, you can configure journald to use syslog, and no that doesn't require a recompile.
If you want my arguments of anti-systemd it would be the team that develops it is one of the worse teams to work with and the amount of scope creep is frightening. I think we can all agree that those two things pose the most headache to systemd than this notion of "oh the files are in binary, you boned brah!" Is systemd an ideal solution, nope. But as much as everyone tried, upstart and the like of init replacements were going nowhere fast. At some point, the haters are going to have to realize, they're still working on systemd and they are still making changes to make the tools better and the formats more resilient. Does that mean there will be 0 corruption, no. But you do have to realize that the project is still being actively maintained and they are addressing or have addressed many concerns the enterprise customers have had with it. There's real money being toss at the project to work things that people don't like out of it.
TL;DR - I'm not a huge fan of systemd mostly because of the crazy scope creep, but c'mon the binary argument is so behind us now.