Debian flamewar (plus a "GNU/Linux" rant) (plus PHP4/PHP5 experiences)

[Fred]

On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 23:28 -0500, Kevin D. Clark wrote:
> Benjamin Scott <bscott at ntisys.com> writes:
...
> You haven't lived until you realize that the poor slobs three cubes away from
> you have 6 copies of the "same" DLL, which they categorize by file
> size.  When they want to run application A, they copy the X-byte DLL
> to the system directory.  When they want to run application B, they
> copy the Y-byte DLL to the system directory.  You hear people yelling
> things like "NO...DON'T RUN THE APPLICATION WITH THE 9689-byte DLL --
> IT CORRUPTS THE DATABASE!".
> 
> Things like this cause me to weep.

It would be a definite ROFL if it weren't so serious.

In the past I've been involved with BIG Windows systems/applications
developments, and you get nowhere unless you pay a big support fee to
Microsoft and develop first-name relationships with various key
engineers.

I doubt if the situation has changed much today. Haven't bothered
looking at their .net offerings since I became a die-hard Java and Linux
type by then. 

While we are on the upgrade subject, I will soon be upgrading my
dedicated server from RH9 to FC3. Upgrades of this magnitude *always*
involved gotchas, but I've done this upgrade once before so I kinda know
what to expect. 

I am forced to do this upgrade, BTW, because I *need* PHP5 running on
that server, and keep running into dependency issues under RH9 that yum
cannot resolve -- mainly because the RH9 repositories are no longer kept
up to date. PHP5 has it own peculiar dependencies depending on what
features you enable when you build it. And I spent time resolving one
such dependency on RH9 and ran into yet another after that. That was a
hint and a half for me to bite the bullet and just upgrade the entire
distro.

Yum works like a charm when everything is up to date in the
repositories. It's next to useless otherwise.

I've not used Debian before, and now after having followed this
"flamewar", methinks I'll stick to Fedora. RPMs and Yum are not perfect
by a longshot, but I know how to work around those headaches. apt-get
would introduce a new set of headaches, and I'm running low on the
asprin. :-)

> --kevin

BTW, if anyone's interested, getting my PHP4 code to run under PHP5 was
mostly painless -- just a few minor changes I had to make.

Alas, my code can't be pure PHP5, but parts of it must still run under
PHP4 systems. Since PHP5 code generates syntax errors under PHP4, I've
had to devise means to keep PHP5-code from even *loading* under PHP4.
Turns out that my equivalent of an autoloader that I created for the
PHP4 code lended itself nicely to the solution.

The biggest difference which I had to deal with is how objects are
passed, assigned and copied on PHP5. Since I've been paying strict
attention to this under PHP4, that made it all that much easier to fix.
The "clone" keyword under PHP5 breaks under PHP4, so I took the rather
clever approach of using "clone(...)" which winds up calling a dummy
function under PHP4 and works as the "clone" keyword under PHP5. That is
pretty much the only really nasty kludge I had to implement.

I really *like* PHP5 because now I can do the same style exception
handling I had gotten used to with Java and C++. I also like the stack
trace dump I automatically get by echoing the exception object. And
there are a few other niceties that gives me the "it's about bloody
time" reaction.

-- 
-- Fred
"Don't let IE happen to YOU!"
- My daughter, who designs web sites for everything BUT Internet
Explorer.