From: http://lwn.net/2002/0117/index.php3
Should Aunt Tillie build her own kernels? Eric Raymond has been working for some time on a new kernel configuration system which, someday, is slated for incorporation into the 2.5 series. This project has seen its share of controversy over the last year, but, perhaps, never at the level of the last week. What is the development that has set off so many kernel hackers? It is an autoconfiguration module (implemented initially by Giacomo Catenazzi) which figures out which hardware is present on the system and cooks up a kernel configuration to match. Eric has been working overtime to justify this work by way of an amusing set of stories. For your amusement, here are the inspirational tales of Aunt Tillie, her nephew Melvin ("Autoconfigure saves the day. Possibly it even helps Melvin get laid"), and the 'girl geek' Penelope. Beyond the possible improvement to hackers' love lives worldwide, the reasoning behind the work is essentially this: "Because the second we stop thinking about Aunt Tillie, we start making excuses for badly-designed interfaces and excessive complexity. We tend to fall back into insular, elitist assumptions that limit both the useability of our software and its potential user population. We get lazy and stop checking our assumptions. When we do this, Bill Gates laughs at us, and is right to do so. " There are reasons to question some of Eric's scenarios. Aunt Tillie is almost certain to be happier with the kernel supplied by her distributor, which includes numerous patches, has modules for an unbelievable variety of hardware, and has been extensively tested. Building and running a kernel off the net, even from a "stable" series, will never be without its potential surprises. But the hostility to the autoconfiguration idea seems to go beyond that. Some people clearly do not want Aunt Tillie to be able to build a kernel without learning about the process and understanding what hardware is on her system. Some, perhaps, fear Aunt Tillie's inevitable "help me" message to linux-kernel once the process fails. Others, perhaps, prefer a world where only the Select Few are able to do certain things. That latter view was often seen in arguments against the desktop projects a few years ago, though it seems to have faded away in recent times. But perhaps kernel hackers ("girl geeks" included) remain a more hairy-chested bunch. If Aunt Tillie can build her own kernels, that's one less thing that sets them, and their skills, apart. Linux hackers in general have managed to get over this attitude in general, and that has been an unmitigated good thing. It has been repeatedly shown that Linux can be made easier to use without taking away the power appreciated by more advanced users. And an easier Linux, among other things, helps to ensure that the advanced users can work with Linux in the office as well as at home. So there is no harm in the creation of an autoconfiguration system for the Linux kernel, as long as nobody is forced to use it. Even if it does not really solve Aunt Tillie's problems, there will certainly be a class of users that is helped by easier kernel configuration. It may even turn out that some of those kernel hackers end up using it to quickly configure and build a kernel for a strange system - when nobody is looking, of course. (See also: Aunt Tillie's web site, hosted at her very own aunt-tillie.org domain - thanks to Nicolas Pitre). _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.