Recently John Allspaw tweeted about some'terrible hack' comments in the source code of various importantprojects. One of them was Go, which made me curious about thecontext. Although I can't exactly match Allspaw's version of thecomment, I think it's this comment in src/reflect/value.go ,which I'm going to quote in full:

func ValueOf(i interface{}) Value {    [...]    // TODO(rsc): Eliminate this terrible

For reasons that don't fit within the margins of this entry, I recentlyhad to poke around the pkg system on OmniOS in order to find out someinformation about packages, such as which package versions are availablein the OmniOS repo, what package versions are on the system, and whatpackages provide certain files.

So, first, versions. pkg packages have a short version and a longone, as so:

$ pkg list kernelNAME (PUBLISHER)  VERSIONsystem/kernel     0.5.11

A while back I tweeted :

Every so often I dream of genuinely sysadmin-friendly OS installers. Idoubt I'll ever get them, though.

As it happens, I have a specific vision of what being sysadmin friendlyhere should be and that is easy modifications.

The reality of life is that OS installers are necessarily verygeneral but they are most frequently used in much more specificsituations, ones where you already know the answers to a lot of thequestions they'll ask. At the same time there

I mentioned on Twitter that I'vecompletely flipped my view of git (and Mercurial) around, to thepoint where I actively like using git and want to be using git forthings. This goes beyond where I used to be ,where I simply felt that git was the right thing to learn and usegoing forward for relatively pragmatic reasons. Part of this isundoubtedly just increasing familiarity with git (it's hard not tofeel good about something you use a lot), but I can also point

Apparently, it may be the case that if you do not hold kernels andother packages on your Ubuntu machines, ' apt-get autoremove ' maydo what I want for limiting installed Ubuntu kernels . Unfortunately this is not an option forus (and we're probably not alone in this).

Our fundamental rule is that for certain sorts of packages, weinstall or update them only occasionally, under controlledcircumstances. For kernels, this is because reboots must be planned(and we don't like divergent

In a comment on this entry , Sandip Bhattacharya asked me:

Also, sometimes transient NFS server issues can cause the NFS mount tobe wedged, where any access to the NFS mount hangs the process. Howwould do you escape or detect such conditions?

This is a good question in general and I am afraid the bad news is thatthere don't seem to be any good answers. Our usual method of 'detecting'such problems is that a succession of machines start falling overwith absurd load averages; generally

Back in my entry on the difference in available pool space between zfs list and zpool list , I notedthat one of the reasons the two differ is that ZFS reserves someamount of space internally. At the time I wrote that the code saidit should be reserving 1/32nd of the pool size (and still allowsome things down to 1/64th of the pool, like ZFS property changes)but our OmniOS fileservers seemed to be only reserving 1/64th ofthe space (

Our mail system has everyone's inboxesin an old-fashioned /var/mail style single directory; in fact itliterally is /var/mail . This directory is NFS mounted from oneof our fileservers , which raisesa little question: how can we be sure that it's actually there?Well, there's always going to be a /var/mail directory. But whatwe care about is that this directory is the actual NFS mountedfilesystem instead of the directory on the local root filesystem

It started with an Eevee tweet :

like does anyone actually care about blog categories, considering youcan just skim the list of titles and get a pretty good idea

It turns out that I have opinions on this, perhaps unsurprisingly.My answer is 'yes', or at least potentially yes . In fact Ithink there are several different levels of things that you wantto have in a fully featured blog system.

The pragmatic purpose of categories is to allow people to easilyfollow only a subset of your blog, both