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I hope the experience is less filled with tedious "mah Unix philosophy" for the BSD community than it was for the Linux community, but I wouldn't hold my breath

• _delirium 11y ago
  The linked article is fortunately not really in that genre. It's criticizing the specific proposal in a reasonable amount of detail, not just vaguely criticizing the abstract idea of launchd for being allegedly "not unix enough". The main thrust of the criticism is that wholesale porting over the OSX services layer to FreeBSD produces a poor fit, because a lot of the OSX design is designed for a different purpose: as developer-facing tools used to configure/ship a desktop/laptop OS, not sysadmin-facing tools used on servers. Also, it's all tied up with Mach in a way that is fine if you're running Mach (as OSX is), but drags in a lot of baggage for FreeBSD.
• digi_owl 11y ago
  Then again, Launchd seems to know its limits...
• gdwatson 11y ago
  Doesn't the design philosophy of a complex piece of software matter? Doesn't consistency of philosophy provide power by enabling separate pieces to integrate smoothly? There's a legitimate discussion about tradeoffs to be had, sure. But at least since Fred Brooks it's been quite clear that conceptual integrity is valuable. And the concepts behind Unix have been shown to be consistent and powerful; Plan 9 demonstrated that there's still unexploited potential there. The Unix philosophy argument may be wrong in a particular case, but it shouldn't be derisively dismissed.