On 22/05/2013 23:39, Daniel Campbell wrote: > I do not consider Gentoo to be only about my own choices, but as a user, > who else's choices am I going to consider when I administer my system? > I'm happy for any new choices as long as they don't step on mine. I > think that's fair.
Your choices are necessarily constrained by the fact that other people also have choices, and those people use a copy of the same machinery you use to implement their choices. You do not operate in a vacuum, and you cannot consider just your own choices and get a sane result - Godel proved that this cannot happen in this universe, in much the same way you cannot multiple two and three and get nine. Now, you cannot know what choices I've made here on my systems, but you do know that I have choices and you must consider that fact when making your choices. This has many side-effects, but the most common is that often you have to give a little to get a lot. In the case of systemd - people like Canek have the choice to use it, and to give him that choice you pretty much have to tolerate that all our machines are going to get unit files. That's the bit where you give a little. It works in reverse too. If you want KDE you get .desktop files and so does everyone else, and they too must give a little. If the generic machinery (aka package managers) that deals with this stuff doesn't quite cut the mustard as you would like, you still retain the ultimate choice: rm or it's expedient cousin INSTALL_MASK -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
