On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 05:19:09PM +0100, Nelson, David J wrote: > Do we want a UNIX standard? A linux standard? A Gentoo standard? A lowest > common denominator standard? A "what most people prefer" standard?
I am not talking about which colors to use, which is a personal preference and can have no standard. I am talking about the most basic principles, that all programs behave the same and can be enabled or disabled in the same way. When gentoo unilaterally decides to do the opposite, it sticks out like a sore thumb. The proper way to add color to emerge and its affiliates would have been with an alias, as it does with ls, not by adding hard coded escape chars to messages, nor by defaulting to color enabled and adding untested non-functional control features to disable it. There are programming standards too. They include, at the most basic level, testing new features to make sure they actually work and not using hard coded magic numbers when existing libraries handle the feature and are known to work. Even you, as a non-programmer, can see how those standards are good ones to follow. > > Several other now-forgotten similar breakages which rendered my system > > unbootable. Gentoo is the absolute first Unix system I have used in > > 25 years which I have been leery of rebooting for wondering if I will > > have to break out the rescue disk yet again. When there's an upgrade to the basic commands, like /bin/ls, it is only reasonable to assume it is a useful upgrade. My system is not mission critical for a company, only for me, but I do not relish spending hours trying to figure out what some amateur has done to screw up an upgrade. I shouldn't even have to worry about such basic common sense as these failures. > Insults rarely get you anywhere. Constructive feedback and discussion are > generally better options FYI. Like I said. My experience has been that people who don't follow even the most rudimentary principles, like testing features, following standards, and reusing existing code rather than hard coding magic numbers, simply do not listen to old farts who file bug reports. This has been from years of experience with coworkers and with mailing lists. My rant here has been to let off steam. I am not going to waste time filing a bug report about magic numbers, standards, and testing new features, when those are the things that should be taught in the first weeks of any programming course and explained in the first chapters of any programming book. I might as well explain 2+2=4 to someone screwing up his calculus homework. -- ... _._. ._ ._. . _._. ._. ___ .__ ._. . .__. ._ .. ._. Felix Finch: scarecrow repairman & rocket surgeon / [EMAIL PROTECTED] GPG = E987 4493 C860 246C 3B1E 6477 7838 76E9 182E 8151 ITAR license #4933 I've found a solution to Fermat's Last Theorem but I see I've run out of room o -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list