question

[Jordan Hubbard]

libh never lived up to its promise, that much is certainly true.

The pity of all this is that there's never been the right sort of 
project management or even group consensus necessary to come up with 
any credible replacement strategy.  Libh was never the cause of 
FreeBSD's lack of a good replacement installer, merely a symptom of the 
general lack of desire to deal with this problem space.   People just 
keep doing (barely) evolutionary hacking on the existing tools and 
somehow perceiving this as sufficient and that's just a shame since 
it's limited FreeBSD's success (trying, as it has, to be "the 
mainstream BSD").  Meanwhile, the SuSE and Red Hats of the world 
continue to march on and offer installation and package management 
experiences that are at least an order of magnitude more extensive than 
FreeBSD's.   Even Debian, who one could argue is more of a reasonable 
comparison to FreeBSD given that it's all been volunteer driven rather 
than subsidized by a corporate sugar-daddy, offers a better 
installation experience.  Not an order of magnitude better, but they've 
at least put some effort into this area and appear to be continuing to 
do so.

If libh is finally pronounced dead and buried without ceremony, I hope 
that this is announced a little more widely and with at least some 
attempt to provoke discussion concerning "if not that, then what?  
Nothing?  Really??"

- Jordan


>> I feel that libh has taken too long the role of a failed promise for 
>> the
>> FreeBSD community and rightly deserves to die now.