Software, written by people, will always have problems. The authors are imperfect and so is the result
I have stopped compiling things from scratch if I can avoid it. A reasonably current version from a package is fine givem the opportunity cost of building all dependencies. Some build systems are getting better and some authors include links to dependencies in their repos. It is still often too hard to make it worth it. It may not be as secure but I don't keep anything terribly sensitive on those boxes. On any box, I keep my sensitive electronic data to a minimum. I may have a ssn in a tax return pdf but everything else is stored online at the provider (like banking data) On Jul 9, 2014 6:51 PM, "Raul Miller" <[email protected]> wrote: > So... J has a lot of bugs that need fixing. > > Meanwhile, my laptop died, and I've been working on getting some > others set up so I can work. > > Windows 8 is something of a mess, I've been working all day on getting > a laptop with windows 8 up to the current specs. > > OpenBSD is something of a mess, I've been working all day on getting a > browser running on it. > > It's kind of amazing that anything works, given how many problems there > are. > > Let's take OpenBSD - I'm trying to build www/chromium there. But > building pulseaudio I need to build python which needs tcl which needs > some xml documentation which needs db/v4 which if I build it needs jdk > which needs python, but there's another way of building it without jdk > but that still fails because install wants to change directory to > example.c which doesn't work, so everything fails, and now I have to > unsnarl an install process which probably never worked because whoever > is working on this stuff probably got their executables from someone > else that doesn't use this rats nest of chained dependencies. > > With proprietary software, it's probably worse, but it's hidden so we > can't see it. Except, the problems there are so enormous that after > all day of applying patches to a factory clean version of windows 8, > I'm just now getting to a point where it approximately works. > > What's amazing is that anyone can even talk about security, given this > rats-nest of laziness, without breaking down laughing. > > Meh... > > Oh well, > > -- > Raul > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
