On Friday 10 March 2006 14:18, Robert Schiele wrote:
On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 01:45:30PM -0500, Joseph M. Gaffney wrote:
So nothing yet from Novell or the developers?
Why should the developers say anything here about that? The whole discussion was completely emotional with no technical reasons. Thus you just addressed the wrong people and should try to talk to the marketing department instead.
My comments (and others) have gone a bit further than that, though I honestly don't remember if that were here or somewhere else (alot of forum postings over the past day or so). To sum it up, concerns are related to: Increased CPU/Memory usage from implementing a managed application as a core SUSE application for package and system management, possible legal ramifications, the reason for basing such a system on a set of "standards" that are controlled by another organization known to implement its own variations on a whim, the current state of Mono support and stability by comparison to other distros, the possibility for multiple required snapshots (a la wine or cedega as examples), and concerns over a lack of involvement from the openSUSE community. Some of that is for marketing, some of that is for management, and some of that is for developers. Not sure if I missed anything.
I believe alot of people here have expressed serious concerns with the use of a .Net based application as a core component, and I have yet to see any official response on this.
Well, whether your concerns were serious is quite questionable. Your main argument was that you associate .Net/Mono with Microsoft and that you do not like Microsoft. I don't like corporate policy of Microsoft either but competing with a company does not mean running through the world with blinders, ignoring this company's products.
No, that wasn't the reason. My concern is over duplicating the efforts. As I said (I'm pretty sure in forums on this one, so noone here would have seen it), innovation by duplication isn't innovation at all. I would much rather see a better system created, standardized, and implemented. I personally believe what ODT teaches us (yes full acceptance is a long way off, but I believe it will hold up and expand) is that an open standard with a thorough review process will result in a highly competitive product, beyond what can be offered in current commercial packages. A traditionally proprietary corporation implementing such standards seems highly unlikely, allowing the "alternative" (and I use quotes because its more than an alternative, its an improvement) to thrive. Without such a refined method, I don't believe the idea would have even come up in Massachusetts, and spread to other governments and organizations in the way it has so far. I also have no issue with implementing Mono and using it as a means by which Novell can take on the corporate desktop; .Net is a reasonable way to allow a company to comingle Linux and Windows. What I have issue with is using it, as mentioned, in such a required application. Nothing can be done is C# that couldn't be done in C++, and managed applications simple have a much larger footprint. To use a .Net application as an example, the Notepad implementation Microsoft offers as a sample, which doesn't even have the slightest bit of advanced features such as find and replace, uses a whopping 8MB of ram. Is this the kind of memory usage Linux users are going to see in the future? Considering the size of a system management application, when implementing large-scale changes and updates, is it possible that the 2GB limitation for a single thread could be reached (referenced to unpatched 2GB/2GB limitation on 32-bit systems with the linux kernel)? To what specifications will 10.1 capable systems need to be to pull off regular use of ZEN?
Note that I don't like programming (although I sometimes have to do it) in the Java language because it has some rather stupid design flaws in my opinion. But I don't run through town like a maniac crying that I will never use applications written in Java. As long as I do not have to maintain the software and it is doing his job I don't care when it is written in Java.
For technical reasons I avoid Java, in combination with the philosophical ones. As long as another option is available, I will avoid java at all costs, much like I do GNOME (I'm just a KDE guy - this is just simple preference).
Apart from that you are always free to port the functionality that is currently implemented to run on the Mono engine to your favourite language.
Robert
My concern isn't that I couldn't port it or replace it by another means, my concern is what this means for the future of the SUSE Linux platform. Will (and this is a prediction based on my experience with managed environments such as .Net) memory and CPU hogs become more prevalent, and integrated with the core that makes SUSE Linux the SUSE Linux distribution? Will the end users be required to make significant upgrades to their hardware to be able to perform an initial installation on slightly older hardware? There seem to be quite a few concerns (and I'm not the only one) as to the use of .Net based apps, but no apparent or offered benefits. This is what I would like some clarification on. Joseph M. Gaffney aka CuCullin