[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [Sheflug] Help - CDROM
>>>>> "Ian" == Ian Wright <Ian [at] iw63.freeserve.co.uk> writes:
Ian> Stephen: Your comments about Mandrake running away doing its
Ian> own thing may well be based on sound facts but I think they
Ian> do have one major thing in their favour - they are rapidly
Ian> making Linux attractive to the masses and usable by even the
Ian> tyro user.
I don't have a problem with this. I'll be happy to support their
ex-users when they graduate out of Mandrake.
All I'm saying is that Mandrake is making work for the rest of us, and
that if Mandrake users want support, they should call Mandrake.
If Mandrake were simply specializing in ease of use, that would be
laudable. But what they are actually doing is free riding on the good
reputations, maintenance and support effort of various projects
without giving anything back. They did not submit their patches to
us. When we asked them to find an alternative way to achieve the same
goal so that people who wanted to use more recent versions of XEmacs
would find that their configurations "just worked", they said it was
impossible. In fact, in the last two weeks three separate solutions,
one of which should be fully satisfactory to Mandrake, were proposed
on the xemacs newsgroups.
Ian> Perhaps whats needed is a Linux 'monopoly' to reduce the
Ian> number of variants to one??
Not at all. We have very little trouble working with the other major
distributions. Variety is the spice of life. I just object to the
fact that Mandrake has set call forwarding on their 800 support line
to _my_ phone.
Ian> Alternatively, the developers of apps could just bite the
Ian> bullet and write their software in such a way that it will
Ian> work with all the distros available at the time and then
Ian> update it whenever new distros are released.
No chance. Mandrake is a .com; they can pay for that work, or they
won't get it. Everybody else does their best to work with the
standard APIs. Why can't Mandrake?
And there's a third way, one which is the foundation of both the
Internet and Linux as we know it. Cooperatively design and implement
standards that minimize friction where the moving parts rub together.
Mandrake is not interested in cooperating, at least not with my
project. So be it; we aren't going to support problem reports from
Mandrake users unless we already know they are our bugs. Nor are they
user interface publishing standards, as far as I know, which would be
a big contribution.
I don't have any objection to that as a commercial strategy. I am not
going to contribute to their success by solving their bugs for them
without pay, though. And since one of the big selling points for
linux is the support you can get by posting to lists like this, I
think prospective Mandrake users should be informed of what they're
missing, as well as what they're getting.
Ian> either linux is developed in such a way as to make it popular
Ian> and usable by the 'general public'
I don't have a problem with that. I do have a problem with doing it
by distributing persistently[1] variant versions of the software
itself rather than configuring via the documented APIs and interfaces.
Sometimes those APIs have to change. The particular problem that
Mandrake found is a workaround in Emacs for a design flaw in X11; it
goes back 7 or 8 years. We would be happy work _with_ Mandrake on
fixing this particular problem. _They_ are not interested. They
don't have to deal with the bug reports. (Most are occasioned when
people upgrade from the now rather stale Mandrake version to a more
recent version of XEmacs, and their Alt key stops working. Naturally
they conclude that's a bug in the new XEmacs, rather than the deletion
of two countervailing bugs in Mandrake.)
My objection to Mandrake is not their support of "nontraditional"
users. My objection to Mandrake is that when those users graduate to
a moderate level of cluefulness, it generates unnecessary work for
everyone else because _Mandrake doesn't share_.
Footnotes:
[1] Ie, if they want to come up with a _real_ solution that we can
merge or adapt, that's fine with me. They don't have to wait for us
to merge it before distributing themselves, either. But they really
ought to send us a patch if it's a real solution.
--
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 straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to
- <sheflug-request [at] vuw.ac.nz> - with the word
"unsubscribe" in the body of the message.
GNU the choice of a complete generation.