[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [Sheflug] Help - CDROM
Hi Stephen,
I was obviously at a disadvantage information-wise. I can fully appreciate
your feelings now and sympathise with them. I must admit though, that I do
get frustrated at the slowness of development of linux. Many of the distros
I've tried are either too difficult for me to install or are so bland and
uninspiring that I can't be bothered to fight with them. At the same time,
whilst there are a multitude of apps for linux, most of them are so
'functional' and dull that there is little to inspire a new user. So many of
them have the appearance of programs which went out of date with the
Spectrum ZX80 that, even though they probably have functionality almost as
good as the windoze equivalents, they keep it very well hidden below layers
of cryptic command line mnemonics. One of my interests is music writing and,
whilst there are linux programs that will give printed output almost as good
as Sibelius on Windoze, I have to have several separate apps running at the
same time on linux - each with its own instruction set.With the depth of
programming expertise that exists in the linux community and the apparent
ease with which 'front ends' can be generated in such programs as Tcl/Tk, it
is difficult to see why there hasn't yet been a general concerted effort to
'pretty up' and integrate applications.
I don't know whether this kind of uninformed end-user view is of any
interest to people like you 'at the sharp end' but writing it has been good
therapy for me ;o) - I'll now go and have yet another try at getting CMN and
MUP to work (music writing programs I've been fighting to get working for
most of this week without any success!)
Best wishes, Have a good Christmas,
Ian
--
Ian W. Wright
Sheffield UK
www.iw63.freeserve.co.uk
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull [at] sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>
To: "Sheflug" <sheflug [at] vuw.ac.nz>
Sent: 23 December 2000 08:08
Subject: 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.
>
>
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
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.