Re: my 1.6.1 probs

2003-03-26 Thread Matt Sergeant
On Wednesday, Mar 26, 2003, at 22:30 Europe/London, S Woodside wrote:

 Anyway, I guess that 1.6.1 doesn't really work on debian 2.2, is the
 upshot.
I wouldn't go that far. I suspect it can be made to work.
Sure, with hours of hacking as I don't have root so I'm going to start 
installing everything under the sun lcoally, changing my paths etc. 
etc.
I meant: given sufficient tuits, the problem could probably be found 
and fixed. Unfortunately I just don't have access to a debian 2.2 
machine, and if I did I wouldn't have much, if any, time to dedicate to 
this :-( Perhaps one of the other developers is in a different 
situation, I don't know.

Along with the problem of xsltproc and LibXSLT in AxKit giving me 
different results, I am starting to get quite frustrated with the 
constant hacking and toolset problems involved in working with AxKit.
I wish I could help as fast as you need the help. Sorry.

Matt.

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Re: my 1.6.1 probs

2003-03-26 Thread S Woodside
Well, part of my frustration is generally that the axkit user/developer 
base is small. Smaller than it should be IMHO (I can't comment on why 
that might be true for the developer base but there doesn't seem to be 
as much user understanding of what a userful tool it is).

simon

On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 06:02  PM, Matt Sergeant wrote:

Along with the problem of xsltproc and LibXSLT in AxKit giving me 
different results, I am starting to get quite frustrated with the 
constant hacking and toolset problems involved in working with AxKit.
I wish I could help as fast as you need the help. Sorry.

--
www.simonwoodside.com -- 99% Devil, 1% Angel
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Re: my 1.6.1 probs

2003-03-26 Thread S Woodside
To add to this, sorry for the spam but I think this is 
relevant/important. A lot of the discussion on this list seems to 
assume that those involved consider modifying the AxKit code itself to 
be a reasonable solution ... to me that's just not an option. Sure, I 
could probably do it (after a week of learning more perl) but I'm not 
interested and I'd rather spend my time learning XSLT etc. So 
suggestions of the nature of it could be hacked to make that work are 
somewhat unhelpful.

simon

On Wednesday, March 26, 2003, at 06:49  PM, S Woodside wrote:

Well, part of my frustration is generally that the axkit 
user/developer base is small. Smaller than it should be IMHO (I can't 
comment on why that might be true for the developer base but there 
doesn't seem to be as much user understanding of what a userful tool 
it is).
--
www.simonwoodside.com -- 99% Devil, 1% Angel
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Re: my 1.6.1 probs

2003-03-26 Thread Kip Hampton
S Woodside wrote:
To add to this, sorry for the spam but I think this is 
relevant/important. A lot of the discussion on this list seems to assume 
that those involved consider modifying the AxKit code itself to be a 
reasonable solution ... to me that's just not an option. Sure, I could 
probably do it (after a week of learning more perl) but I'm not 
interested and I'd rather spend my time learning XSLT etc. So 
suggestions of the nature of it could be hacked to make that work are 
somewhat unhelpful.
I won't speak for anyone else here but I do understand your frustration.

Reality is, though, that AxKit is an Open Source project and that 
implies several things: First, that it is a volunteer effort-- every 
line code is the result of someone either needing to meet their own 
specific requirement, or having a good idea and enough free time and 
chutzpah to implement it.

Second, AxKit being OSS means that, sometimes, more is expected of its 
users. Granted, patching the AxKit source is not always an option for 
for everyone (even if they do know Perl) but if a person can't patch, 
the very least they can do is provide a detailed report that includes a 
reproducible test case, stripped down to the minimum needed to expose 
the suspected bug.

We share with the hope that others will share as well, and that the sum 
of that sharing will make a better AxKit for everyone.

Now, let's talk about the AxKit bugs that you've posted here in the 
last week..

First was the Debian 2.2 iconv problem...

turns out he's running debian 2.2 which has a known problem detecting 
iconv. The workaround apparently is either something very complex 
involving testing versions of libc6 or to hack the makefile to skip the 
test on iconv (since it just thinks it doesn't work, it actually does 
work apparently).

Perhaps you might explain how a known problem on a particular version of 
a particular Linux distribution is exactly an AxKit problem? It looks 
like none the the AxKit commiters run this particular flavor (I don't), 
so there's no way for us to to even duplicate the problem, let alone 
create a work-around for potato's braindeadedness. What do you honestly 
expect us to do?

I'm sure we all wish that AxKit were always a painless installation on 
every variant of every platform, but the truth is that AxKit glues 
together a lot of complex libraries that we don't control and if one of 
those libraries has problems on a given platform the best we can do is 
try work around it if we can.

Did you try commenting out the checks for iconv in 
lib/Apache/AxKit/Makefile.PL as your friend suggested? Seems to me that 
would work around Debian 2.2's bad behavior nicely. No?

Next we have the AxKit and xsltproc give different results post...

Here you provide copious amounts of information, but never once simply 
state *what* the differences are, nor do you even attempt strip things 
down to a minimal case that duplicates the problem. Do you honestly 
expect that we should not only help you solve your problem, but help you 
define what the problem is in the first place?

I could easily nuke you back to the Stone Age for what I consider to be 
a selfish and demanding attitude, but I won't. For the most part, I find 
the ideas that you put forth here to be an interesting part of the 
chorus and I'd hate to lose them. That said, however, you need to 
seriously re-examine your expectations about value, collaboration, and 
whose job it is to solve your problem du jour.

-kip

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Re: my 1.6.1 probs

2003-03-25 Thread Matt Sergeant
On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, S Woodside wrote:

 Well i think I finally figured out why my buddy's having trouble
 installing 1.6.1 on his box ... turns out he's running debian 2.2 which
 has a known problem detecting iconv. The workaround apparently is
 either something very complex involving testing versions of libc6 or to
 hack the makefile to skip the test on iconv (since it just thinks it
 doesn't work, it actually does work apparently). Anyway now I'm going
 to lobby him to upgrade to 3.0 woody, hopefully that's a fairly
 painless thing to ask him to do.

 Anyway, I guess that 1.6.1 doesn't really work on debian 2.2, is the
 upshot.

I wouldn't go that far. I suspect it can be made to work.

-- 
!-- Matt --
:-get a SMart net/:-
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