I found a tool that looked useful but wasn't in Debian due to licensing issues.
I shall not name it, as it's probably fairly typical and singling it out is not
the point of this rant.
I grabbed the source tarball expecting a few iterations of trying to build it
and then installing a random lib*-dev package until it stopped complaining.
Noting a lack of Makefile or ./configure script, I gingerly peered into the
README, mostly expecting some default text from a template rather than anything
useful. Instead, it commenced thus:
"!!!!!ATTENTION!!!!!
"Before starting the build you may need to setup the KDE4 environment variables.
To do this open Project->Project Options and then look at the "Run" and the "Make"
pages. Each of these two has an environment variables widget in which you have
to fill in the right values for the variables already listed."
That's correct. One of the dependencies to build a small tool is to *install an
IDE*. My Linux box is headless and I ssh in from a Mac, you fuckers. And do you
want to know why I now have headless Linux servers and Mac desktops? Because
fuckheads like you building Linux distributions broke my perfectly good
WindowMaker configuration in 2005 when trying to bully me into going GNOME and
knackered all of the X11 libraries so it was virtually impossible to exorcise
it so I could have a working system again. Those of us with jobs and credit
cards won't put up with that nonsense and will pay for the problem to go away.
It seems that despite - or perhaps because of - a further five years of
development, the Year Of The Linux Desktop is further away in the future than
it was before. I note that in our development team, the number of Ubuntu
desktops is shrinking and Macs are proliferating. It takes a lot of effort to
drive away your core users, but I see that Linux GUI developers are up to the
task.
