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hanoman
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 12:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Let me share my experience..... I have tried many distros. I just started to 'play' with gentoo recently. I tried this distro in 2002. It was ok :wink: that time, but I decided that its not matured yet. So I used other distro as my main workhorse. (Debian Woody :arrow: Debian Sid).

Recently I decided to reinstall linux into my comp back. I have few options: Mandrake, Debian or Gentoo. Every single one of the distro has their good and bad points. Finally I decided to install Gentoo.

What I like about it:
:arrow: Bleeding edge program or package
:arrow: Customised to your hardware configuration
:arrow: I like the idea of 'emerge'. I don't like RPM
:arrow: The documentation is ROCK Solid

What I don't like about this distro:
:!: Take too freaking long to install :lol:
:!: Program always need to update once in the while
:!: It does not have Debian 'dselect' -> neat package selection :twisted:

Thats about it I guess. It was my choice so I need to accept it.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 1:11 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

hanoman wrote:
What I don't like about this distro:
Take too freaking long to install :lol:

At least you learn some things.
Quote:
Program always need to update once in the while

Update as often as you like... I emerge -uD world to ~x86 every few days, but that's just me. Updating every couple weeks is probably a good average figure.

emerge screen and try "nice screen" followed by emerge -uD world and CTRL+D. It will emerge in the background and not bother you... at any point you can screen -r to check its progress, from any terminal :)
Quote:
It does not have Debian 'dselect' -> neat package selection :twisted:

have you tried porthole ? pye suits my needs most of all...
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 1:25 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

jsosic wrote:
Shadow Skill wrote:
Someone please explain the logic behind this insane idea that a bleeding edge system MUST break, using Fedora Core three for some months I never experienced a single program totally posses X and all system resources requiring a hard shutdown/reboot with the exception of XMMS [I do not think the bug was ever isolated and it only seemed to affect a relatively small number of people using xmms.] however I have experienced mulitple hangups while emerging with Gentoo the most serious being pyqt which never even finishes building even after leaving it on more than six hours.


Than use Fedora. PERIOD.

I'm sure everyone has a suggestion to make. That's why we have this many distro's, because it's imposible for people to agree. I think this should go this way, comunity doesn't, and I make my own distro. And that's ok. But some people around here are trying to change Gentoo into second Debian, or even much worse, I see mentioning of Fedora!!! Why to reinvent things? And if Gentoo doesn't fullfill your needs, why stuck with it? Just to be cool? I don't get it?

One more thing, If you need rock stable distro, then you won't choose Gentoo. Gentoo is stable, but is not for production servers. Neither is Crux, Fedora, Mandrake, Suse, Linspire, Xandros, Debian Sid. It's like complaining on mm or ck patches that they aren't secure enough nor stable for 150days uptime.


Do you live on planet Earth? What kind of good package system allows the user to completely destroy various configuration files with a ridiculous amount of ease by default like portage does with etc-update? [There was supposed to be another command that works better than etc-update just can't seem to find out what it is anyone know?] Why would you have a split dependency system [Like virtually all Linux distrobutions.] and not have a truly working out of the box reverse dependency mechanism that at the very least defaults to notifying the user when he is about to nuke some dependencies during an uninstall operation, it shouldn't be nessecary to memorize yet another seperate command, the mechanism really should have been in place when Gentoo was first created or at least when the creators put it up on the net for people to download.

Personally the ability to ignore dependencies while uninstalling stuff is great however I do not choose to forget that generally speaking its stupid not to have a working reverse dependency mechanism, and that ignoring dependencies in such a case should be explicity declared by users and not a default action. Your reply to me does not speak well of your ability to judge my point using some sense, use another distro does not make the problem go away, just like compiling from source code on an rpm based distro does not make rpm work. Stop whining telling people not to use the system and actually focus on the point the user was trying to make.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 2:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Shadow Skill wrote:
There was supposed to be another command that works better than etc-update just can't seem to find out what it is anyone know?

dispatch-conf

Before using it, you should emerge rcs (not necessary) and edit /etc/dispatch-conf.conf (necessary).

Please use this before ever making another complaint to the tune of "Portage nuked my config files again".
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 2:26 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Thank you I have been wondering what the command was for a while now.

The point I was making is that it shouldn't be allowed so easily with a default setup, a default setup should protect the user from doing such things there simply shouldn't be commands for system updating that can so easily destroy config files which may in some cases make yourt system not boot properly if it happens to eat fstab. I learned really quick to micro manage my config files and have not had any problems since my initial incident in which fstab was destroyed by etc-update. What is of more concern to me is the lack of reverse dependency resolution, while its good for me if I just need to "unbreak" a package or two but I can't help but think I have a few broken dependencies in my system floating around. I hope the developers integrate the existing tools for resolving broken dependencies into portage soon.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 2:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Shadow Skill wrote:
Thank you I have been wondering what the command was for a while now.

The point I was making is that it shouldn't be allowed so easily with a default setup

dispatch-conf is in the "default setup" of portage.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 2:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I will stress again should not be allowed regardless of which command I use, in short what I am saying is that certain configuration files like fstab for example should default to a protected status [yes I am aware that you can rig this, I just have not had the time to research how to do it and its been simpler to just manage it myself at this point. The point I am trying to get across is not really for someone who has been using Gentoo for some time its more for the person who is using it for the first time. Who probably will think nothing of doing etc-update then doing a nice -5 even after reading through the diff which probably won't make sense if the person has never seen something like that. Think of it like this Windows stupidly defaults users to administrator level power. Which I think we all understand is not exactly a smart thing to do. We might know that doing so many things as root is not a smart thing but do you think most Windows users notice? Even if they do notice it may be virtually impossible to use the system conviniently given the structure of the OS if they make a normal user account. In Gentoo's case its too simple although not entirely unavoidable to break the system at least once simply using commands that are presented to you unless you already know the different concerns with various commands. Personally I did not know etc-update was probably not the best tool to use for config file updating until after my fstab got eaten I just figured it was another way that was not nessecarily "better" to perform the task. Linux does tend to have multiple commands or methods of achieving the same affect after all.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 3:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Shadow Skill wrote:
I will stress again should not be allowed regardless of which command I use

Including
Code:
rm -rf /
?
Shadow Skill wrote:
what I am saying is that certain configuration files like fstab for example should default to a protected status

Are you aware that the default fstab will result in an unbootable system?

More sensible would be for users to be instructed in the Handbook to run etc-update or dispatch-conf BEFORE making any personal changes to system config files.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 3:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

etc-update... dispatch-conf call it what you will, but the real problem is PEBKAC... (Problem Exist Between Keyboard And Chair)

Your car will not stop your from driving into a lake or wall either, but nobody complains about that. If you do, is it the cars fault or your own fault?

Erik
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 5:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Why in the hell should the mount points you have set ever be rewritten by either of those commands? It doesn't make sense unless the method for mounting changes eg you go from /mnt to /media with udev then you should be prompted to actually edit the file yourself it shouldn't just replace your config file during the update with some generic fstab setup even if you have selected to actively merge the file [looking at the diff out put is quite pointless as it is so convoluted. Its also an option that depends on you actually understanding what every single config file actually does and its just not going to happen in real life. ] if it happens to be a critical system file like fstab. Linux does not default to allowing a normal user under any circumstances to simply delete let alone edit files owned by the administrator, so why should update tools although run by the "administrator" be allowed to so readily destroy critical files?

I know how not to break files like fstab and such on my machine so etc-update is not that big of a deal but not everyone who will be using the system will understand the pit falls of various commands its not as though there is some big red text that says even when doing etc-update -3 you may munch mission critical config files even when using this relatively safe option with etc-update. This is done with emerge --depclean as soon as you execute the command it clearly states that you can seriously damage the system by even actually using the command. [If its so damned dangerous how exactly am I susposed to safely fix broken dependencies?] While it may be true that it is usually best to leave config files you do not understand alone I would think its possible to begin working with programs that posses bad configuration file setups that could impair performance if one does not update the config files at some point. For example some times when installing window managers especially when updating to a new version the WM ends up breaking in some [usually] minor way like retaining the old UI setup as opposed to going to the newer setup. I find that deleting the config directory for the given WM in my home directory usually fixes the issue [I am pleased to say I didn't have this problem with my update to Gnome 2.10 with Gentoo unlike with FC4test1[same problem with the stable releases btw], probably have to give in and nuke my home directory to fix some stuff...sigh..]and I am able to continue bussiness as usual.

All I am trying to point out is that users probably are not going to know what all of the configuration files do and because of this fact of life the update system should not require micromanagement to attempt to avoid totally annihilating the setup. The every day commands people will use to maintain packages on their system need to be safe enough that there is not a seventy percent chance depending on what config file needs "updating" that the update will really break something.

Before someone repeats something along the lines of "Its all your fault its broken, you should not have updated; stop complaining Portage is the most perfect tool ever!" I would ask you if you would like to try what passes for version upgrading with Fedora Core? What is considered updating consists of formating your hdd and doing a clean install of the new version. Do you know why? It is because upgrading from Fedora Core 2[stable] to Fedora Core 3[stable] ensures that your setup especially mime types will be broken. Its even worse if you don't use an iso to do the upgrade and try and upgrade via yum or apt especially yum since yum functionality changes quite a bit between fc2 and 3. I don't think anyone here would consider that a good upgrade mechanism. Its the same thing with the way portage works when it comes to real world package maintenance, just as the Fedora developers need to make upgrading versions of the OS as painless and seamless as possible, the Portage developers need to make Portage require less micromanagement and further safe guard the user from unknowingly breaking his system simply by performing an update.

There is no reason whether the OS is "bleeding edge" or not for someone's configuration to break as easily as it can with Gentoo during normal usage, when other bleeding edge systems show that the breaking need not occur as often as it does or as easily with Gentoo. If the x86 arch is supposed to be "stable" as opposed to the ~x86 arch the things that happen to many users using the stable arch keyword should not be happening with such a frequency.
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 8:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Why is -D even an option? I did it once, hosed my system. Never have touched -D since..
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 8:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've now read through all posts in this thread and I'm disappointed about how few actually understand and respond to labrador's points which are, IMO, excellent. Telling people to "go away" or reacting to very detailed, calm and constructive critisizm with a simple "Goodbye" reflects badly on those people.

Anyway, Gentoo is my wet dream of a Linux distribution because

- it compiles (almost) everything from sources,

- it is more up-to-date than any other distributions I've ever tried (and I've tried many and, in contrast to what my post count here might make some think for many years now),

- it has the one package management I've ever found to be acceptable (I passionately hate rpm and things like "stow" are nice but a pain in the ass),

- it keeps me busy fixing the stuff broken by -uD (actually, I never run it like that but emerge manually, but you get the gist). :->

Having praised Gentoo enough for those who consider critisizm to be blasphemy, I'll have to say that I would never even remotely think of using Gentoo in a production environment. For geeks, I'd always recommend Gentoo and even the 100th incarnation of the binutils disaster wouldn't stop me. For business? Never.

If the Gentoo guys want to please us geeks, Gentoo is perfectly fine. But if they want to achieve "world domination" and conquer the server rooms they would be well advised to listen to labrador. I'll take his critisizm a step further:

QA? Doesn't really exist. You'll throw at me that binutils was in "unstable", that it was an isolated case, this is a hobby, the guys are volunteers, etc.. All of those being lame excuses from a professional point of view:

Unstable: If something is completely broken, it must not get out. By no means. If it does, QA failed miserably.

Isolated cases: Such things do happen fairly often if you use Gentoo. Yes, a lot of other loudmouthes (besides myself) will now shout "Never happend to me.". I beg your pardon. Do you *read* these forums? Or the bugs in Bugzilla?

Hobby, volunteers: All fine and good and right. BUT: Doing this on a voluntary basis or as a hobby doesn't relieve the Gentoo devs from the *moral* obligations towards their users. If you do something for the public, do it as good as you can. If you aren't good enough, stop doing it for the public. As simple as that. If you keep on with it, you'll disappoint the public *and* yourself in the long run and you aren't doing anyone a favour. Let's take the binutils disaster as an example: Had I been either the maintainer or a member of the QA team I would have fixed the problem and then stepped down. I've been there and did it. Both in my private life (I couldn't perform as well as the public had hoped nor could I accept the way I did it myself) as well as in my job (that's simply job ethics).

Gentoo has a social contract. It's missing something, though: It fails to mention the moral implications of promoting Gentoo and the Gentoo devs' implicit moral obligations towards their userbase. I'm not speaking about any kind of warranty or likewise foolishness; I'm simply speaking about the responsibility that comes with success. And Gentoo *is* successful and rightly so. But, as in "real life", this means one has to step carefully and acknowledge that responsibility. Denying it doesn't mean it goes away.


All of this amounts to a major lack of QA for Gentoo Linux. And this is a "bad thing". (Unless Gentoo users are all geeks which the forums prove wrong.)

I won't comment on the detailed critisizm about package warnings; labrador did a good job on that. Just the "solutions" are a joke - read this, read that, use the 150th 3rd-party-tool or unstable stuff with a big, fat warning when you start it. That's for geeks, not the average Joe, Otto, Jan or Pierre.

But are "we", the community, satisfied with attracting only our kind? Personally, I'm not (but then I'm not really a fan of incest anyway). I'd love to see the "commoners", "mundanes", "plebs" use Gentoo. Linux is more than a software project; Linux is a vision of a possible future for ALL of us. Not only the geeks, not only those in power or the moneybags. I consider Linux to be (or better: become) a movement. Consider what good it could do to stop the widening information gap between the northern and the southern world.

Does Gentoo want to take part in this noble cause? It should and it could.

Nor are those "solutions" suitable for business use: Professionally, I've come from system administration; I wouldn't have had the time to do all that while supporting users and being a part of the general helpdesk. It's simply impossible if you value your job.


Anyway, this has become a fairly long post already... I won't go away from Gentoo because of its current deficiencies. For a guy like me Gentoo is a wonderful playground but I'd like to see this playground span the whole world and I want ALL kinds of people in this playground because, honestly, you can't play eternally with geeks only (and I'm bowing to my wife and kids for they amazing patience with me :) ). Sometimes one needs a bit of good old-fashioned sanity. ;-)
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PostPosted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 10:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Offtopic: Is -D the same as --deep, and why does it break the system when used with -u? [I happened to do it quite a bit recently :( And --depclean is looking really nasty, I'm afraid to actually even attempt to fix the problems because I can pretty much gaurantee that it will result in me having to reinstall Gentoo from scratch which will probably only take about four to six hours since I will have to install a bunch of base libraries and those always take forever.]


Ontopic:

Couldn't have said it better myself.
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 2:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Philantrop wrote:
I've now read through all posts in this thread and I'm disappointed about how few actually understand and respond to labrador's points which are, IMO, excellent. Telling people to "go away" or reacting to very detailed, calm and constructive critisizm with a simple "Goodbye" reflects badly on those people.

Amen
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 4:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I currently run Gentoo, Debian, Arch, Slackware, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, Mandrake, DSL as a basic home enthusiast ..... - the way I approach the Gentoo "time issue" etc is simply not to update it every "5 seconds"...... and personally don't have a compelling need to, or problem with this approach at all (for Gentoo) - as a contrast, I typically update my other distros much more frequently - however, again, am quite happy with this more "infrequent" Gentoo approach (for Gentoo), and don't see it as an "all or nothing" matter.

More importantly, what an excellent and informative thread - :)
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 4:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
Here are a list of things Gentoo does wrong:

* purely security related updates not available as emerge option


I understand what you're saying. I'd say:

subscribe to gentoo-announce and only update packages that are actually earmarked for security bugs.
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 11:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Did I say GOODBYE! to the TS already?

:lol:
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 12:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quite frankly, I don't understand how so many people (if there are, in fact, so many people) are managing to totally screw up their /etc directory on a regular basis. I even used etc-update for a long time and I can't recall causing any serious problems. Then again, I never used the 'do X to all of my files' options...

Shadow Skill wrote:
Linux does not default to allowing a normal user under any circumstances to simply delete let alone edit files owned by the administrator, so why should update tools although run by the "administrator" be allowed to so readily destroy critical files?


What exactly do you propose? These tools need to be able to modify your configuration files. That's what they're for. Would it be better if when you told it to do something, it asked if you were sure 3 times? Do you expect them to be intelligent enough to determine whether they will break your setup or not?

As for --depclean, it is dangerous. It's entirely possible that it will remove a package that will break things, if your world file was damaged or something. You do realize that's what it's for, right? It's not for fixing dependencies (that's what revdep-rebuild is for), it's for freeing up disk space by getting rid of packages that you probably don't need. You could go your entire Gentoo career without using --depclean, as long as you aren't anal about your disk usage (of course, that doesn't describe many people around here, in my experience :)).

Someone here already pointed out dispatch-conf (which is part of the sys-apps/portage package, and is therefore part of portage by default), which eliminates about 90% of the micromanagement you're complaining about. If a user doesn't know what the other 10% of their configuration files do, then they shouldn't be using Gentoo in the first place, because you can't avoid going into /etc with this distribution (correct me if I'm wrong).

I've never seen configuration breakages like people are describing here. I'm pretty sure I'm not a genius, so can someone explain why I don't see massive problems on a weekly basis when I update my machine? Am I leading a charmed life of some sort? Lucky at Portage, unlucky at love, or something like that?
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 3:22 pm    Post subject: Re: Why I'm dropping recommendation of Gentoo Reply with quote

labrador wrote:
I've been using Gentoo for a year and 1/2. It has worked fairly
well for me, but I've come to the point where I have to conclude
I spend too much time on maintenance, and I am starting to
have serious concerns regarding the very short QA time Gentoo
has between unstable and stable.


This is certainly a legitimate concern. The good news is that there is a project to develop a "stable" portage tree which focuses upon a subset of packages available within portage at large, and is intended to support them for a clearly defined period. I don't know how far along the project is but I thought I'd mention it as no-one else seems to have done so on this thread. See GLEP 19 for further details.
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 3:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Just to point it out once more, glsa-check is not "the 150th third party tool", but the official beta implementation of GLEP14, which looks to me exactly like what labrador's asking for. If you want it, test it and report bugs you encounter.
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 6:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

[quote="psyqil"]Just to point it out once more, glsa-check is not "the 150th third party tool", but the official beta implementation of [url=http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/glep/glep-0014.html]GLEP14[/url], which looks to me exactly like what labrador's asking for. If you want it, test it and report bugs you encounter.[/quote]

Just to repeat what has been said quite a few times in this thread already: glsa-check is the "unstable stuff with a big, fat warning when you start it" (quoting myself; the "150th 3rd-party-tools" are cruft-scripts, log analyzer and the like). I'm sorry but such a tool is nice, I use and like it, but it's not yet *reliable* and its *developers* put this in the tool's output.

Are you seriously suggesting we use such a tool on *production* systems and rely on it? If your answer is "No, but you can check the security bulletins" (as has been suggested before) we're back to labrador's original posting - maintenance is a pain in the ass like that.
A "yes" as an answer is simply not acceptable for a productive system.

Many of you are thinking of short-time strategies which is fine for personal use but not in a business. Personally, I'm willing to fix a broken ebuild for personal use and will happily spend some spare time (and, yes, if I do, I usually file a bug and attach the fixed ebuild). The admins in my company and those of our customers don't have that time.

Nobody (including labrador) has said that those changes/additions are to be implemented by tomorrow. This whole discussion would be pointless if at least the *need* for such actions was acknowledged. (Given that the professional use of Gentoo *is* a goal.)


Ladies and gentlemen, why are some of you defending Gentoo as if it was your purse? labrador's posting (and most of what followed) was about *improving* Gentoo which is already good but could be even better. Gentoo has the potential to blow quite a few "competitors" out of the water - why let this potential go to waste?
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 6:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Philantrop wrote:
Nobody (including labrador) has said that those changes/additions are to be implemented by tomorrow. This whole discussion would be pointless if at least the *need* for such actions was acknowledged. (Given that the professional use of Gentoo *is* a goal.)
I don't get your point. There is GLEP14, there is GLEP19, it's not ready today, it won't be ready tomorrow, but it's on its way. What labrador asked for in his original post is exactly what glsa-check provides, and it will be integrated into portage when it's ready. If you want it faster, do it yourself or bribe someone to do it, same as it ever was... :P
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PostPosted: Wed Mar 30, 2005 7:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

glsa-check is a prototype its being tested, changed, tweaked. It could really mess some things up until it is "finished" therefore the warning.

Gentoo is young its not yet perfect. The QA is fine even running ~x86 I find that most problems are caused by improperly setup applications.

What gets me is that people want to upgrade everything constantly, run a continuous system without reformats and never want to touch a configuration file. If you dont know what a configuration file does. Or what each line in the file does, guess what you dont know the most basic level about how to control the application you are running. You might as well complain about how you cant get a program to work when you dont know how to use the parameters

some of you people want it to be super stable. Thats a really complex problem with the continuous development system that gentoo has.
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Shadow Skill
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 31, 2005 5:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

So what that is like saying "You are dumb because you do not understand the code that actually makes up a program, which is in fact the most basic level of control for a program. So why dare complain as you are not the one who made the program? " Claiming that not understanding how a configuration file works means you do not know how to use a program is a fallacy on its face, because it is like saying you do not know how to use a program because you do not know how it was built in the first place.
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Dolio
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 31, 2005 7:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Not understanding the code for a program and not understanding the configuration file are quite different.

In many of the cases where a user is required to actually go into configuration files, the configuration file is a large part of interacting with the program. The main examples I can think of are Apache, Postfix and Samba. How do you "use" those programs. I suppose you could say that with Apache, you "use" it by dumping html files in a directory, but really, you interact with Apache via a configuration file. It's how you tell the program what to do.

That's quite a bit different than not knowing the code for Apache.

For many programs (servers and daemons and the like), not taking the time to understand the configuration file is similar to not taking the time to understand the user interface, or at the very least, the user interface for configuration. Sure, in some cases a reasonable default can be put together, but it's unlikely to do anything that you actually want it to do.

Do you get angry when you open Firefox for the first time and its default homepage isn't set to your personal favorite? Most desktop software takes some configuration before things are just the way I like it. That's just a fact of life. I don't complain that I'm required to look through the configuration dialogs in Konqueror in order to get things the way I want it. How is that situation different, other than the fact that some people think text is scary?
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