Nigel Stewart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote, in part:
Besides this, I find it quite valuable to be able to download
and install something in a short enough timeframe that I havn't
already forgotten what I intended to do with it. :-)
I must say that I rather agree with that sentiment. I don't know, and won't
attempt to speculate on, ESR's specific issues with Fedora but I can
understand some of his frustration. Fedora, SuSE, and the other major
distros shouldn't be aimed solely at very savvy developers, but should
be installable by newbies. I'm not a newbie - I started my UNIX
experience back in the mid-80's running ULTRIX[tm] on a VAX-11/780
that we had leftover in our of our field support labs at DEC. I first tried
Linux by downloading SLS floppy images off the 'Net and scrambling to
find one of the two PCs in the lab, writing the floppies and then taking
them home to try on my PC. The Yggdrasil CD didn't come along for
another year or so.
That said, the various major distributions should be straightforward
enough to install so as to provide a reasonably predictable baselevel
system. I continue to get VERY irritated when I find that one capability or
another can't be added to my SuSE system without going to Packman
and then getting caught in dependency hell, because he (Packman)
links his builds to whatever else he happens to have in his sandbox(es).
(His builds of K3B are a prime example). Is it Packman's fault? NO -
because it's perfectly understandable that he wants to keep pushing the
envelope on a number of interrelated development projects. BUT, it's
VERY annoying that updated versions of, say k3b, can't be obtained from
[open]SuSE or other sites without extraneous entanglements.
I'm still trying to get DVDs to play on my x86_64-based SuSE 10.2
system; Kaffeine complains that the DVD is encrypted, and neither it nor
VLC can make use of libdvdcss-1.2.8-2.network.i386.rpm or
libdvdcss2-1.2.9-1.i386.rpm. I suspect that their files need to be installed
in some arcane directory somewhere, but the last dozen or two that I've
tried don't seem to do the trick, and there's no x86_64.rpm available.
It's these sort of nonsensical integration issues that will ultimately kill
Linux, and I suspect it's what ESR was really complaining about.
Bayard
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