Bloat & Planned Obsolescence (was tlug: libwcsmbs thing)

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

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

    Matt> When I think about it, what really sticks in my craw is
    Matt> GTK. Seems like every cool GTK app that comes out, without
    Matt> fail, requires the absolute latest version of GTK ... and if
    Matt> I upgrade it breaks every existing GTK app, especially the
    Matt> GIMP. Which is why I'm now using KDE instead of GNOME.

This is upstream, again.  Apparently it happens with TCL/Tk, too;
Debian keeps several versions of those around.  :-(

But this is a common attitude at GNU: you're not paying us, so we're
not going to give you the respect that paying customers get.  If we
get a chance to fix a "curio" (Fred Brooks's term for a bug or an
implementation detail not specified by design that turns out to be
useful---and depended on), we'll do it, even if it breaks things.

This is _not_ the attitude at the distributions (not even Debian);
their role is to make things work together, they're not going to go
out of their way to break what's working already---even if sometimes
Red Hat makes it look that way ;-)

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

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

Many of the more recent packages expect capabilities that are built
into the unstable distribution, but would have to be hacked in to the
stable.

For example, I installed unstable on my Sparc, but X don't work :-(.
In the process of trying to figure out what's going on, I tried going
back to a 2.0 kernel.  And the console broke....  (2.0 kernels expect
/dev/console to be a symlink to /dev/tty something IIRC, a major 4
device.  2.2 kernels have a separate major 5 device for the console.)

unstable assumes you want Unix98 ptys; 2.0 kernels don't know about
that.  This breaks some apps.

And so on.

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

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

I like dpkg.  dselect started creaking under the weight of too many
packages at about 1500.  It's still usable, especially for mass
upgrades (waiting a week with unstable will produce dozens of upgraded
packages these days), but for installs of new packages I often use
apt-get directly to avoid doing a mass upgrade when all I want is
mp3asm :^)


-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
__________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________
What are those two straight lines for?  "Free software rules."
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Next Technical Meeting: October 9 (Sat), 13:30   place: Temple Univ.
* Linux Internationalisation Initiative (Li18nux) speaker: Akio Kido
* Japanese TrueType Fonts                     speaker: Adrian Havill
Next Technical Meeting: November 13 (Sat), 13:30 place: Temple Univ.
* Network Security                               speaker: Steve Baur
Next Nomikai:  December 17 (Fri), 19:00 Tengu TokyoEkiMae 03-3275-3691
-------------------------------------------------------------------
more info: http://www.tlug.gr.jp        Sponsor: Global Online Japan