On 2/25/07, Kjel Anderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I don't love the style of ESR's comments, but I think that maybe some folks on the list are missing his point. I believe he is trying to express that as long as installing software has anything to do with how "rusty your cs skills are", adoption of Linux for regular users is going to continue to be low.
Actually, I suspect ESR was just pissed that his system was screwed up, and ranted in the general direction of Fedora because that's what he happened to be using. How his system got screwed up, I expect we'll never know. It could be his fault. It could be the fault of some third-party packager. It could certainly be the fault of a Fedora problem. Quite likely, all of the above, and more. If there's one thing I can say for sure about computers, it's that they get screwed up a lot. (If this was some random user, I'd be more willing to assign speculative blame to the distribution, but ESR is certainly an advanced hacker, and I would expect his system has been extensively monkeyed with.) Looking beyond "The Life and Times of Eric Raymond", I do think *your* points are very good ones. The whole point of a distribution is to make things easier (for varying definitions of "easy"). If that's not working, things are broken. In response to the source/binary discussion: Building from source *does* bypass a lot of problems. It has been suggested in the past that something like a cross between BSD ports and RPM might be a good solution for many problems. Something that, with one simple command, could automatically download all the needed source packages, configure, build, and install them, without scary looking terminal windows or the need to edit configuration files by hand. However, the "build most things from source" solution is not without issues itself. It it slower than binary packages (imagine installing the first GNOME package this way -- please wait while we build the world from source). It's largely incompatible with the world of closed-source, binary-only software. Depending on the user, that might be considered a feature, or a fatal flaw. It can also make testing/SCM/support a real nightmare, as now every system can have a slightly different configuration. -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/