Fink is a wonderful idea for software. Let's take the debian package installation experience, and adopt it to work on Mac OS X. Nice idea. Really. I mean it. ;-)
It's the execution where it leads to hatefulness, weeping & wailing, & gnashing of teeth. So I'm doing one of my periodic "fink selfupdate" runs[1]. So good, so far. I get to "fink update-all". It gives me a list of packages it wants to update. It's a good sized list, 'cause it's been a few months since last I updated. Fine, I can live with that, I'm at the office, and if it wants to run updates all day, more power to it. ;-) It starts fetching, and for some package, it tells me that <mirror-site1> has returned a 404. What would I like to do? Hatefulness number one: 99.9999% of the time, I am going to take the default option, so why not accept that for me after a reasonable timeout period (say, sixty seconds)? I know fink is capable of such a feat, as it does it when I am running "fink selfupdate". The default is generally, "Try another mirror (somewhere)". Good enough. Don't ask me, or at least, don't wait FOREVER for me to respond. Just go ahead. I trust you. REALLY! Hatefulness number two: On a subsequent package, it tries again at <mirror-site1>, and by d*mn, it returns another 404. Any reasonable person would guess that the site is probably down, and GIVE UP ON IT (at least, for this session). Far be it from me to call fink unreasonable, but every five minutes, I've got to pop back in, see that it tried (and failed) to get a package from <mirror-site1>, and tell it to try another site. AGAIN! AND AGAIN! AND FSCKING AGAIN! AAAAAARGH! This is totally asinine. Really, folks, this is the twenty-first century. Software should be smarter than that. Of course, I know what the problem is: The developers test against sites that are always up, so they never run into this particular bit of hatefulness. I've got a nice brick wall I'd like them to run into. Pfui! [1]Bonus hate: It is "fink selfupdate" but "fink update-all". Why can't it (also) accept "fink self-update"? I always forget which of the two options takes the d*mn hyphen and which does not! -- Timothy Knox <mailto:t...@thelbane.com> 90% of everything is crud. And for software the other 10% is worse. -- Nicholas Clark
