> no, STANDARDS are needed. ones that people VOLUNTARILY follow when creating > their OS. > > as an example, the fact that Gentoo, Slackware, etc, use their own little > messed up init script styles defeats this possibility right now. every time > an OS creator decides to do something "their way" simply out of personal > taste rather than some sort of pragmatic reason they make the situation > worse. every time you choose to support, install and promote such OSes you > help extend the reach of those damaging choices.
Sure, and if you just ran the exe file that came with the CD/download, the drivers would install cleanly on that OS too, since it IS the standard, like it or not. While I certainly agree that these are stupid problems, blaming the OS for doing something different obviously extends to doing something differently than Windows. Different Distros choose different ways of doing things. They do it for a reason. You spoke of KDE/Gnome/Xorg. How is this different than Gentoo/RedHat/Suse. I don't remember seeing support for QT in Gnome, and many (at least the Gnomies) people think this is a good thing. Similarly, Mandrake took Red Hat, and ripped out Gnome, because its a POS ^D^D^D^Dchoice they didn't want to make. Similarly, Gentoo has ripped out pieces of RedHat/Suse that they felt was crap (and obviously there are MANY people who agree, what's the fastest growing mainstream distro again? Which one is dying? (Gentoo & Red Hat, respectively ( http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/07/12/slight_linux_market_share_loss_for_red_hat.html ))) How pissed off are you when you hear that Gnome is the obvious leader in the desktop world because Red Hat uses it, and it certainly appears that Suse is headed there too? So just apply the same arguments here. The fact that something is well established, or popular does NOT make it right/good/etc. CUPS was new a couple of years ago. Is it a stupid project because they're changing the "standard" printing system at the time? Is VIM stupid because it replaces an obviously working VI? Is LDAP stupid because it replaces an obviously working /etc/passwd/shadow/group file? Shall I continue? EXT3 vs EXT2. Reiser vs EXT2/3. SATA vs ATA vs SCSI. 64bit processing vs 32. Email vs Snailmail. Diesel vs Gas engines. This isn't limited to just this one small area. People improve things that don't work well. The fact that this means a change for end users isn't a bad thing. If it is, it is dropped. Gentoo isn't popular simply because it's source based. (Look at Sourcerer). It isn't popular simply because it's free. It obviously isn't popular because it has a great install tool. People work through a long ugly install because the end product IN TOTAL is worth the effort initially. Standards will change. KDE's html rendering engine is used in more than just Konqi because it is flexible enough that it's value isn't diminished if put somewhere non natively. THAT is the problem. Some packages simply are not flexible enough to accomodate being used in more than one way. > > if you want binaries on your OS, then get your OS to play with the larger > community better. this doesn't mean "lowest common denominator" or "Company > X dictates", it means cooperating and working together. if KDE, GNOME and > X.org can manage this then surely Red Hat, SUSE, Mandrake, Gentoo, etc, > etc, etc can too. Better to fix the whole Binary problem at it's core. If I went to kernel.org and updated RH/SUSE/MDK/Gentoo, then they all have the same problem since my kernels don't run modules. Don't rant at Gentoo because they offer flexibility that other OSes don't. Similarly, don't rant at an OS when the problem is with the module. Kev. _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca
