Bloat & Planned Obsolescence (was tlug: libwcsmbs thing)

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

Stephen J. Turnbull writes:

 >     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.

Oh. Bummer.

 >     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.

Hmm, yeah. Actually, I'm not really upset about glibc, in spite of
having been burned with RedHat 5.0. When I think about it, what really 
sticks in my craw is GTK. Seems like every cool GTK app that comes
out, without fail, requires the absolute latest version of GTK ... and 
if I upgrade it breaks every existing GTK app, especially the
GIMP. Which is why I'm now using KDE instead of GNOME.

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

?? Do you mean that there's a lack of Debian packages, or some of them 
just won't work.

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

Yeah, but I thought they had a great package manager ... not to start
any distro wars or anything.

Matt Gushee
Portland, Maine, USA
mgushee@example.com
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