Re: tlug: rpms

["Scott M. Stone" <sstone@example.com>]

On Thu, 1 Jun 2000 limacat@example.com wrote:

> > Suffice it to say that I vehemently disagree with the dumbing-down of UNIX,
> > which is your essential statement here.  If they can't deal with learning how
> > things work, they shouldn't be using the bloody system.
> 
> The most wonderful thing about Linux is that it will bee the FIRST bloody
> system (after Amiga of the golden years) that can be used as the user
> bloodily wants to.
> 
> The dumbing-down of UNIX, is not an unreversible or unchangeable process
> as we can see in other systems (like Windows, that came to 2000 edition
> only to tell the user "Outlook has provoked some errors and will be
> terminated"), because UNIX is a layer-made operating system. 
> 
> X is a layer on top of Unix.
> Gnome is a layer on top of X.
> If you take away Gnome and X, you will still have a working Unix system.
> 
> That's the wonderful thing about Unix.

And now my response, which is the wonderful thing about you missing the
point :)

Chris is saying, and I'm agreeing with him, that we don't want to start
piling on 5 layers of removal from what the OS is actually DOING.  We as a
society have a tendency to do this with almost everything - how many
things that you use are you actually familiar with the workings of?  Do
you know how your air conditioner works?  Do you know how your car works?
Probably not very much, if you're the Average Joe (substitute appropriate
Nihongo moniker for 'Joe' if you wish).  The point is that UNIX is the OS
Of The Clued.  It's an OS that demands something BACK from the User - and
in return the User learns what the computer is doing.  

So say you just downloaded a whole mess of RPMs.  Binary prepackaged ones.
You install them.  "Neat", you say to yourself.  Now you reboot your
computer and you get, say, a fatal error executing init, or /bin/login, or
your shell.  Why?  What did you do?  How do you fix it?  What, what do you
mean you have no idea?  You didn't know you were upgrading your kernel and
your core libraries with those neat binary RPMs?  

Now if you'd built them from source, you'd have seen what was really going
on, and you could have taken precautions.  As it is now, you're going to
have to boot from a rescue disk and climb the steep learning curve anyway,
repairing your system.  Which will probably involve a lot of swearing and
more than one call to your distribution vendor's tech support, who will
cheerily disavow any responsibility for causing the problem.

--------------------------
Scott M. Stone, CCNA <sstone@example.com>
UNIX Systems and Network Engineer
Taos - The SysAdmin Company 

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