Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

I'm sure things like trackstick emulation mode will be thouroughly missed, but I've heard Linux is all about choice and I choose not to maintain this any longer.

— Peter Hutterer

Assume you have 2 pastures, with a gate between them, and a flock of sheep. Your flock is in one pasture, and you want to get them to the other pasture through the gate.
Sheep are, to use the terms we have been using, 'unbreakable', and 'atomic'. (If you slice them into pieces to try to get them to fit through the gate, you will end up with non-functioning sheep on the other side). :-)
If your gate is narrow, you will have to serialise your sheep, and have them pass through one at a time.
If it is wider then parts of different sheep will pass through the gate intermingled from the perspective of a camera mounted on the gate. "Nose of sheep 1, nose of sheep 2, head of sheep 1, nose of sheep 3, head of sheep 3, body of sheep 3, tail of sheep 3, body of sheep 2, body of sheep 1, tail of sheep 2, tail of sheep 1" is what the camera might report as 'having gone passed', and we might conclude that sheep 3 is a small lamb, and that sheep 1 is its mother who slowed down going through the gate so that the lamb could keep up with her -- but all of this doesn't matter because, as long as you do not try to break them, the flock will function perfectly on the other side of the gate without any attention being paid to them by you.

— Laura Creighton on the PyPy transaction model

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Quotes of the week

Posted May 10, 2012 4:00 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Is this *the* Laura Creighton? I recall similarly intelligent and impassioned postings on Usenet decades ago. Everything she predicted about shared libraries came to pass, but somehow we have survived. "Somehow" describes a great deal of work, including support for versioned symbols, versioned library package names, and package version dependencies, none of which were obviously workable or obviously sufficient at the time.