Re: [tlug] Super long compile times

[Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com>]

Dogpile on the wabbit! Dogpile on the wabbit! :-)

On Tue, Aug 26, 2003 at 05:50:04PM +0200, Godwin Stewart wrote:

>What's that? Isn't it that fscking PITA which tries to automatically mount
>any media put in a device

Yes, that's supermount, in all its crappiness.

>spam, therefore Mandrake are spammers. Therefore they'll never get a penny
>out of me and I'll always go out of my way to point this out to people
>asking if Mandrake is any good.

In case we didn't have enough technical reasons to dislike Mandrake,
spam alone would suffice. 

Oh, hey, here's another good one.  If you try to setup a software RAID
1 in Mandrake 9.1 during the install, after you've set up the partitions
and RAID devices and hit next, it chugs along for a few seconds and comes
back with "mkraid failed."  Two 80GB drives attached to a supported
PCI IDE card.  Tried Mandrake 8.2 beta 2 on it.  Seemed to work, so
then changed horses to the 9.1 install CDs and did an upgrade install.
That seemed to work too, except in practice it didn't: trying to 
actually boot the system failed because it wasn't loading the RAID1
module and couldn't start RAID.  From maintenance mode you could manually
do an insmod raid1 followed by raidstart -a and get all of your md devices.

Since that didn't work out, the family Mandrake victim decided to just
install 9.2 beta 2.  Yes, I advised against it; Mandrake releases - 
especially point zero releases (since RH is getting more stable, they
seem to think they need to carry the broken point-zero torch) are
unstable enough - I'd sure  hate to run a Mandrake beta.  The
horror!  Anyway, after deleting all partitions on both drives which would
be RAID members and doing everything from scratch, then setting up all
partitions and RAID members again, it came up with with - you guessed it -
mkraid failed :-p  It worked once on the beta, funny it would fail the
next time with all the same hardware, partitioned the same way.

Oh, and if you put / on a RAID 1 partition, it tells you during the 
install that you must have a separate /boot b/c no bootloader can
boot from RAID.  This is, of course, not true - both GRUB and LILO will
boot from an md device.  

In contrast, Red Hat 9 had absolutely no problem setting up RAID 1 
devices across those two disks and installing to said RAID, so that
whole problem can be laid squarely at the feet of Mandrake.

Of course, this all pales compared to when they started shipping
CUPS back in the 8.x series.  It was completely broken.  In a twist
on the Mac slogan, "It just doesn't work" described it perfectly.  The
Mandrake forums were filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth over
CUPS, and it was some months (and not until 8.2, IIRC) and much pain
later that my family Mandrake victim was able to get CUPS working.

It was totally broken, and they shipped it that way.  I have to say
*knowingly* shipped it that, because there is no way it could have
escaped anyone's attention.  Shipping a product aimed at the newbie
market, with a subsystem as critical as printing is to most people
completely broken and not even including a prominent warning *before*
they put their money down for a CD set, is unconscionable.  Granted, 
CUPS was a PITA in those days.  I tried it on Red Hat back then and
had no end of trouble with it.  But Red Hat was only including it
for the brave or foolish, not making it their default.  Red Hat stayed
with LPRng and it worked.  I wonder if they've gone over to CUPS now?
Gotta check that out.

So, one day about a year ago, not long after my conversion from Red Hat
to Debian, I decided to try out CUPS in Debian.  Imagine my utter shock
when I installed it, debconf asked me a few questions, and after the
setup was finished I opened the CUPS page in a browser, printed a test
page and immediately got a printout.  No sweat, no strain, no pain.
This was in Debian Stable.  I run Sid now, and it works just as well there.
I've been using CUPS ever since.

I'd like my family Mandrake victim to eventually wean himself from GUIs
and run Debian, but that's a bit much to expect at the moment, so
Red Hat will have to do.  After about three years of using Mandrake
and being a fairly staunch defender (he drew the line at Mandrake Club,
but bought several boxed sets), even he is getting sick of it.  I never
thought I'd see the day.

What really bugs me the most about the whole thing isn't the various
technical failings we've been discussing here.  It's that those technical
failings are all present in a product that wraps a bunch of pretty GUI
tools around things, pitches itself to the newbie, and seems to do 
so much to isolate the newbie from exposure to (and learning about)
the underlying Unix-like OS.  Yet there are so many things that either
don't work or don't work as they should, updates that break things,
etc.  That is utterly unacceptable.  If you're going to go after the newbie
market, the "Just Works" bar needs to be set very high on your product.
You can't ship printing systems that don't work, installers that have
serious bugs, etc.  You have to deliver a solid, reliable product.

As some on /. would put it, Mandrakesoft, YOU FAIL IT.

Jonathan
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