[Discuss] systemd sucks and containers suck and language-specific package repos suck

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

Kent Borg wrote: 
> On 9/15/26 7:29 AM, Dan Ritter wrote:
> > which is evidence that the development process is broken
> 
> I look at all the layers of software that a cloud program runs on as
> evidence that the over half-century old model of what an OS needs to do is
> obsolete.
> 
> The program that ran on Unix was presented with a pretty simple API.

"everything is a file" they said, but they lied.

Plan 9, mostly, managed to make everything a file.


> I think
> the program that runs in the cloud can have a pretty simple API, but setting
> up the environment for it to run *in* is not. The amazing complexity in
> between for the cloud program is all stuff that seems a coherent OS should
> do.

Sure. That's what every "framework" or "platform" has promised for the
last 20ish years. Many of them have delivered on that to some large
degree.

Now there are N+1 standards to choose from, and if you choose
incorrectly, you get to face the world alone. On the other hand,
monocultures are extremely dangerous.

The ideal which we will never reach is to have a mere two dozen
or so actively supported platforms for application development.

-dsr-