tlug: libwcsmbs thing

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Matt" == Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com> writes:

    Matt> <rant>

<img src="snicker.mp3" amplification = 16>

    Matt> Hey, how's this for a radical idea?  Just say no to
    Matt> RedBloat's planned obsolescence.

It's not RedHat, this time, it's the upstream vendor.  I'll give an
example shortly.

The bad guys in this one are probably the Debian-JP folks.  If it's
not them, it's Ulrich.

    Matt> and one of the "selling" points of Linux was freedom from
    Matt> forced upgrades. Whatever happened to that??

<tongue-in-cheek>
Those who have already caught a Windose are moving into the Linux
world.  I don't see any reason why we true believers shouldn't get
rich off those suckers who think of a computer as a household
appliance that should be require as much sophistication as a toaster
of its users, we'll charge less than Bill would have.  Not to mention
more often (make it up on volume) ;-)
</tongue-in-cheek>

    Matt> </rant>

    Matt> ... as I get close to switching to Debian ...

Hate to tell you this, Matt, but XEmacs broke _twice_ as I upgraded my 
Debian system from glibc 2.1.2pre3 to 2.1.2pre7 to 2.1.2pre9 to
2.1.2pre12 to 2.1.2.  That's life with an unstable distribution, of
course, and rebuilding XEmacs fixed it every time so far.

Point is, it's hard to refuse a glibc upgrade, because with Uli
breaking binary compatibility in every release, _something_ will
break.

But there really is good stuff in the new glibcs, and some of the neat 
new apps won't work without it.  If you don't like that, you can
always go fork yourself ;-) you'd be in good company: XEmacs, egcs,
all them YAWMs, and opensource.org itself.

If you're willing to stick with the stable release, you should be OK
with Debian.  But it costs you a lot of apps.

And as for bloat ... Debian is up over 4000 packages now ....

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