On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 03:28:29PM -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote: > Their challenge is that they need to provide choice so they > have what they call reasonable defaults.
No, they don't need to provide choice. At least not that many. They decide to do so. That's most of what's wrong with OS stuff these days. Too many choices. Too many knobs. Every day, I see people shoot themselves in the foot, not managing to administer boxes and networks in a simple way, making stupid decisions that don't serve any purpose. ACL, enforced security policies, reverse proxy setups, user accounts, network user groups, PAM, openldap, reiserfs, ext3fs, ext2fs... so many choices. So many wrong choices. At some point, the people who package the software need to make editorial decisions. Remove knobs. Provide people with stuff that just works. Remove options. Or definitely give them the means to do the trade-off correctly. Okay, it's a losing battle. I'm an old grumpy fart. Okay, a lot of IT people are just earning their wages by managing the incredibly too complex setups we face nowadays (and not screwing too badly in front of a multitude of stupide innane choices). Linux is the `culture of choice'. Provide ten MTA, ten MUA. Twenty window managers. Never decide which one you want to install, never give you a default installation that just works. Cater to the techy, nerdy culture of people who want to spend *days* just making choices. We try not to be as bad, to provide default configs that work, and not so many choices.
