Okay, so I installed Fedora 8 today. As is my custom, I turned off the various and sundry magic daemons that Fedora's been shipping for years and years. These are daemons which do various magic things, like detect my hardware, mount my disks, and so on.
I've never liked those things. They're over-complicated. They suffer from high coupling and low cohesion. They re-invent wheels that have existed for years or decades, to no apparent gain. They're poorly documented. They do not grok The Unix Philosophy. Plus, I've always been able to do a better job at knowing my hardware and mounting my disks than the machine can. This is largely because I know what I plan on doing, and the machine doesn't. Same reason I prefer a standard transmission to an automatic. An automatic transmission doesn't know which way I'm going to turn. In Fedora 8, a daemon has shown up called "ConsoleKit". The job of this daemon is apparently to track login sessions. Why on God's green Earth do we need a daemon -- an always running background process -- for this? It could just as easily be done using library routines that get invoked only when needed (i.e., login, logout, user switch, etc.). I keep expecting these design failures to improve, as people realize the error of their ways. However, at least in Fedora, the opposite has been happening: More and more of these things appear with each release. This wouldn't be so bad, except for the fact that in Fedora 8, it's apparently mandatory to run these daemons for things to work properly. Shut them down, and I get constantly spewing errors and no sound. The sound appears to be a permissions issue. Apparently ConsoleKit and/or haldaemon is responsible for granting my user account permissions to the sound device nodes under /dev/. Even worse, this functionality is apparently broken. If I login on the console, /dev/mixer gets an ACL entry granting my account permission. If I run "startx", that ACL entry is removed. [ALT]+[F1] back to text console, it comes back. [ALT]+[F7] back to text console, it goes away. Um. Who thought that would be a good idea? Is this the way the architects intend things to be? Are the people behind Fedora/KDE/GNOME/FreeDesktop.org/whatever really intent on making Linux as complicated and inter-coupled as possible? Have they completely abandoned the Unix Philosophy? I'm asking here because I know there are people reading this list who are close to the source. -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
