Re: Amateur e.

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <nospam [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>]

>>>>> "zzzz" == zzzz  <zzzz [at] zapata.freeserve.co.uk> writes:

    zzzz> "Stephen J. Turnbull" wrote:

    zzzz>  use rpm.

    >> C'mon, let's be part of the solution.  RPM is part of the
    >> problem.  Necessary, but still Microsoft-spawn.

    zzzz> huh?

Point-and-click and your part is over, the system does the rest.  No
brain required.

This is a good thing as it allows those who use their brains elsewhere
to ignore the automatable parts and get on with the parts that can't
be automated yet.  It is a bad thing because it allows those who want
to use computers and LSD simultaneously to do so.  (Nothing wrong with
that if it's a toy OS.  But I get a lot of spam forwarded via big name
distribution boxes that have the "fully loaded" installation with
sendmail or smail wide-open for relay.  I was cracked from one of the
same, the guy didn't know what ~/.rhosts was but he had them in four
users' home directories, including one user he didn't know he had.
Full rootkit installed, needless to say.)

    >> The semantic content of "use rpm" is "go back to bed until
    >> somebody else packages up the RPMs correctly."  That's good for
    >> Red Hat and SuSE profits, not so good for users.

    zzzz> The subject is 'amateur e'.

I've never taken money for writing programs or system admin. :-)

Amateur usually implies inexperience, but it needn't imply inability.

    zzzz> You can't expect amateurs to build libraries. And if they
    zzzz> can, they might as well create the rpm packages on the fly.

True for bleeding edge glibc, even today.  Not true for subsidiary
libraries; the first major thing I ever built was a library (JPEG,
followed in quick succession by zlib, PNG, and then Ghostscript
itself).  Very little in the way of experience required, just choosing
the right makefile and pointing it at the X11 libraries.

In general, building libraries today is no harder than building
anything else, as long as it it properly autoconf'd and your libtool
is working.  Even libtool is hardly necessary in many cases; it's most
important in keeping track of multiple versions (debug, profile,
static, etc) of a single library.

    zzzz> You don't _have_ to wait for someone to package it. Package
    zzzz> yourself

Dunno RedHat, I didn't try that with Debian until I really knew what I
was doing.  Dependencies, FHS, you know the drill.  I suppose RPM docs
have improved since I first tried to build one 3, maybe 4 years ago; I
never did succeed.  I know that rpm now has had a lot of additional
functionality added to help with library dependencies and stuff, but I
don't know how reliable it is in the hands of an amateur.  I know the
Debian stuff is not very (eg, the debhelper stuff usually gets all of
the installation end right for single-binary applications, but
typically leaves cruft in the filesystem, like temporary files and
named pipes, and does not properly clean those up).

I'd recommend installing to /usr/local, myself, until you've built a
few such projects and understand the rudiments of package management.
Then try some .deb/.rpm/.slps or whatever.

    >> Harvey already said he wanted the new versions, let's help him
    >> get them installed.  It's not that the RPMs won't be out
    >> tomorrow (they will), it's the principle of the thing.

    zzzz> my principle is: _NO_ software goes on my system in
    zzzz> unpackaged form.  But that's probably my anal SysAdmin
    zzzz> personality ;-)

Me too.  (Well, almost; I still install the bleeding-edge beta-test
versions of XEmacs and Ghostscript to /usr/local because the
interactions between Debian policy, new layouts in the upstream app,
and existing stable Debian packages are too complex to be worth
doing.)  But learning to do packages right was a big investment.  And
it's still the most time-consuming part of the install for most mature
applications and libraries.

-- 
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