I would be surprised if user complaints were the motivation for syspatch. More likely, the author built something he found useful, and contributed it to the project.
Most of the time on the openbsd email list, when a "user" suggests a feature or asks for a change to something, the reply is something along the lines of "sounds great, where is your patch?"
Exactly this. Unless of course you became an Iridium level donor with the caveat that someone promised to build a Docker clone for you.
Edit: And in response to toyg's comment, here is a link to a video of a talk by the developer in question, who mentions in passing that he builds things for OpenBSD that help him put it into production. This is less than a minute into his talk. Please educate yourself about the project before making ridiculous demands on the devs' time and falsely assigning wrong motives to them. It's unfriendly.
Oh, I am educated enough, don't worry. Which is why I was so surprised to see it finally adopt a solution for a problem that had been pointed out for 20 years, after spending those 20 years replying to everyone that it was just the wrong thing to do in principle.
> It's unfriendly
It's also unfriendly to gaslight away blatant problems, for whatever reason, until they get fixed -- at which point they are admitted as actual problems. Then again, OpenBSD is hardly a friendly project, culturally speaking.
I've read through this subthread with objective concern.
A criticism that seems fair has been presented here in a benign, non-antagonizing manner, and I am very perplexed as to why all comments arguing in favor of that view have been anonymously downvoted wholesale without anything approaching sufficient substantive explanation.
This is not the kind of behavior that (the) HN (community) is respected for.
Let me sum up what I see here.
- Someone argues in favor of Docker, and are downvoted by enough people their comment turned grey. I think this means it's at -5 or -10 or something. So, no explanation, no comments; just downvotes.
- The one reply that goes into a bit detail comes from a traditionalist UNIX standpoint, and is a bit passive-aggressive. (This comment isn't grey.)
- The next reply frames the parent as "THAT HackerNews response to Dropbox", and highlights that the implied simplicity and sense of "only one obvious way to solve this problem" is in fact not implied and that significant wheel-reinvention must (and presumably has) be done "on the ground". Docker's simplicity is highlighted along with its insecurity. This comment is grey.
- The next reply further brushes-off the stated arguments by (passive-aggressively) noting that the project seems successful enough, and maybe that's because they actually have it figured out. (This comment isn't grey.)
- I read the next reply as a gentle reminder of the importance of remaining relevant going forward - and the fact that this doesn't necessarily mean ground-up reinvention. This comment is also grey.
What is going on here?!
A nontrivial number of comments in this thread, and the other OpenBSD threads I've seen, are basically all chanting about OpenBSD's perfection.
Good customer service, good social skills and forward thinking are some of the most fundamental aspects of commercial success. Does open source think it can get away with "no shirt, no shoes" just because it's free? :(
> More likely, the author built something he found useful, and contributed it to the project.
It required a service set up by the project itself. And this after years (decades?) of explicitly rejecting the concept of automated patching (because it supposedly engendered "a false sense of security"). Come on.
Most of the time on the openbsd email list, when a "user" suggests a feature or asks for a change to something, the reply is something along the lines of "sounds great, where is your patch?"