[bcantrill]

(Disclosure: I work at Joyent.)

Are you accusing Brendan of misrepresenting SystemTap on slide 93? If so, could you be specific as to what that misrepresentation is? Brendan has a ton of experience earnestly using SystemTap (or rather, trying to use it), and it's hard to see how sharing that experience makes either Brendan or his employer "look stupid." For more details on Brendan's explorations of SystemTap:

  http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/10/15/using-systemtap/

That's several years old at this point, but the architectural limitations highlighted by Brendan haven't changed.

[nailer]

Yes, I am accusing the author of deliberately misrepresenting facts. I'm not sure what's vague, let me recap:

1. 'might' implies the future. As you can tell from the post you're replying to, Systemtap is present thing. I think I actually put most of the tapsets shown on the Wikipedia page around 2009, and I was using them then.

2. Also, as the author partially acknowledges in the next slide, Ubuntu is the dumbest place to illustrate a typical Systemtap experience. I suspect that's deliberate, rather than ignorance as Sun tried that a few years back and I don't think anyone with any interest in the matter is ignorant enough not to remember the shitstorm.

As I've written elsewhere: if your customers mostly run Ubuntu, then test dtrace on Ubuntu too. It'd give you just as accurate impression about what the dtrace 'experience' is as installing SystemTap on Ubuntu.

Edit: actually looks like Joyent wrote the shitstorm post for a few years ago, you've still got it up, you still don't see anything wrong, and you just linked to it.

christ read the HN comments from 2011. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3118416

Edit 2: you're Bryan Cantrill. You didn't seem to care much about performance a while ago: http://cryptnet.net/mirrors/texts/kissedagirl.html

Edit 3: more Cantrill classiness http://www.quora.com/Node-js/Why-did-Ben-Noordhuis-decide-to...

Sorry to anyone who thinks I've gotten personal, but this guy is a well known... unsavoury character.

[bcantrill]

Sorry, which facts are you accusing him of misrepresenting? Brendan is pretty upfront with what SystemTap is and isn't; which part of his in-depth blog entry on SystemTap[1] do you disagree with? And I get that you're upset that he used Ubuntu, but he's also upfront about why (namely, that's what our customers use); that seems to me to be more of a fact that you don't like rather than a misrepresentation.

I'm also a little confused about your first edit; which "shitstorm" post are you referring to? As far as I can tell, his SystemTap blog entry did not attract a shitstorm -- unless you count you taking issue with it under two different account names on HN[2].

Finally, as for your second edit: given that you've already praised my work, I'll happily accept you assailing me personally. (Or rather, I certainly prefer that to having you praise me personally, but condemn my work...)

[1] http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/10/15/using-systemtap/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3118416, posting as both "nailer" and "mikemaccana"

[nailer]

I have stated which parts are incorrect, and why, very clearly, twice. Stop asking.

Yep, I have two HN accounts from clickpass/openid being shut down, I've emailed YC quite a while ago to sort it out. Hopefully they'll get around to it at some point. The accounts posted in different threads - if I'm astroturfing, I'm not doing it very well. Two other accounts also point out holes in the post.

We're both aware you're well known as a fairly unethical individual, you already know what's false, and you're not interested in correcting anything. I think I've engaged with you enough.

[bcantrill]

Um, wow. I'm "well known as a fairly unethical individual"?! I mean, I know I'm being trolled here, but there's a level of accusation that I simply can't leave unchallenged. Like any human, I'm certainly loaded with faults; I can be brash and opinionated and intimidating and abrasive -- but I also consider myself an intensely ethical person who feels a profound sense of responsibility to my family, my team, my company, my community and my craft. So at the risk of feeding the trolls, can you be specific about why you think me to be unethical?

Edit: Okay, looking at the extensive edits above, it's clear that claiming I'm "fairly unethical" was a reference -- at least in part -- to the pronoun fracas. You may disagree with my position on that (though it's a position I stand by, for whatever it's worth), but I would refer you to cooler discussion on it[1] in hopes that you might at least better understand my perspective.

[1] https://gist.github.com/trevnorris/7729322

[chris_wot]

Yeah, you are unethical. If you had been judged by Sun in the way that you judged Ben Noordhuis then you wouldn't have a job.

I don't think you ever apologized for your "ever kissed a girl" comment? Now you are some sort of bastion of moral integrity that threatens to fire someone you don't employ?

[justin66]

How is it not strange to call a guy out for a petty comment he made seventeen years ago?

[4ad]

Wow, I wish I could flag posts and not only threads. Hell, I wish I could flag users. You have no place here.

/edit: when I posted this, the post above was full of insults.

[nailer]

Sorry, this guy really gets on my nerves, I hope you can understand why. I've edited my post to use better language.

[mevodig]

I can't really tell whether you're being sincere, but you are still way out of line. You've been using emotionally charged language from the start, perhaps you should consider your motivations for engaging in this thread.

[synchronise]

Civility should always be undertaken initially, not edited in.

[icebraining]

You can flag posts, just click on the link that says "link".

[4ad]

Wow, thanks.

[brendangregg]

Demonstrating on Ubuntu was indeed deliberate -- it's because most of my customers, and most of the performance issues I'm debugging, are on Ubuntu.

[nailer]

For the sake of consistency, then, I suggest you install dtrace on Ubuntu.

[_delirium]

I thought that was sort of his point, that you can't? I didn't read it as a DTrace vs. Systemtap discussion, but as an observability-on-SmartOS versus observability-on-Ubuntu discussion. If Ubuntu shipped with DTrace (or it could be easily installed), there'd be no real observability difference.

It's a good point that this is a SmartOS vs. Ubuntu rather than SmartOS vs. all-Linuxes comparison, though.

[nailer]

Running dtrace on Ubuntu is possible: much like SystemTap, it's unsupported and involves lots of messing around.

If someone wrote an article called 'Using dtrace' and wrote about the poor experience they had on Ubuntu it'd be just as (in)valid.

[brendangregg]

Not really; DTrace has never been advertised as a tool for Linux. I've talked about the in-development ports, and that they aren't complete, and that they can panic/freeze systems.

OTOH, SystemTap is advertised as tracing for Linux, and that it's safe for production use. My customers are running Linux, usually Ubuntu, and so I tried using SystemTap.

I wouldn't have written that blog post if the SystemTap homepage simply said: "SystemTap is a tracing tool for RHEL. There are ports in progress for Ubuntu and others, which may panic or freeze systems."

I disagree with the logic for not warning customers of this, and I think it's bad for Red Hat. If the homepage had stated that it's a RHEL tool, those frustrated users would have known to try RHEL, instead of giving up entirely.

[brendangregg]

I did, and I've used it to solve issues on Ubuntu, reproduced in the lab. It's not very featured yet, and it can panic and freeze the kernel. That's why I said "Not safe for production use yet".

[voltagex_]

That post is from 1996. Although it's not great to dismiss a technical post with a single line of snark, is it really relevant to question someone's character based on a post from 18 years ago?

[chris_wot]

When did he apologize for that comment?

Is it appropriate to judge someone's character because he didn't use gender neutral language? Is it even appropriate to threaten to fire someone you don't employ - that's sort of like trying to prevent the guy from having a job - ever!

[otterley]

> Ubuntu is the dumbest place to illustrate a typical Systemtap experience

I'm not sure what to make of this. Aren't Systemtap, dtrace etc. supposed to be generic _Linux_ kernel and userspace tools that are not distribution-specific? If so, then Brendan's opinion is fair.

If not, then sure, some clarification is needed (i.e., substitute Ubuntu for Linux). And I'll add it to my ever-growing list of why production sites shouldn't be running Ubuntu. :)