[Debloat-proposals] ground up development?

[Debloat-proposals] ground up development?

[Dave Taht]

E) "Preliminary assessment, with rough timelines and budgets, for
additional development of a specific OS (if available), or ground up
development (if no appropriate OS is found) to a level suitable for
deployment as an R&D or production platform, including initial
requirements for necessary management and testing tools."

1) I'd like to rule out "ground up development" as an option. Nobody
has succeeded in ground up development of an OS in todays environment
since windows NT and Linux and freebsd in the early 90s. The list of
failed 'new oses' is very long. The list of failing old os's is very
long too - vxworks as one example, qnx as another.

If some argument needs to be presented as to the futility of creating
a new os, I usually point people at various analyses done with
sloccount, which is a useful first step at analyzing a project's
complexity.

http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/linux-kernel-cost.html

It's too bad this sloccount analysis hasn't been updated in 8 years,
and that one that did all of debian seems unavailable.

I also note that the COCOMO model understates the case for the amount
of work involved in the development of any OS, as there is and has
always been, an enormous amount of refactored code involved in
expansion and generality that this model cannot account for.  It takes
as much work, or more, to remove lines of code as add them.

Sloccount also uses a low, out of date figure for engineering salaries
and doesn't factor in management overhead, testing, validation,
support, etc.

I did just run sloccount for just the core packages in cerowrt's
version of openwrt, updating the engineering costs to modern salary
levels, etc. I'll post it, if you really, really, really want to know,
in gruesome detail, what it would take to build a new OS, or how hard
the problems are in fixing various packages.

2) conflating R&D and production is a bad idea. Are we delivering two
proposals?

-- 
Dave Täht
SKYPE: davetaht
US Tel: 1-239-829-5608
http://the-edge.blogspot.com