ARTICLE - ESR gives up on Fedora

[Ben Scott]

On 2/25/07, Kjel Anderson <kjel.anderson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't love the style of ESR's comments, but I think that maybe some folks
> on the list are missing his point. I believe he is trying to express that as
> long as installing software has anything to do with how "rusty your cs
> skills are", adoption of Linux for regular users is going to continue to be
> low.

  Actually, I suspect ESR was just pissed that his system was screwed
up, and ranted in the general direction of Fedora because that's what
he happened to be using.  How his system got screwed up, I expect
we'll never know.  It could be his fault.  It could be the fault of
some third-party packager.  It could certainly be the fault of a
Fedora problem.  Quite likely, all of the above, and more.  If there's
one thing I can say for sure about computers, it's that they get
screwed up a lot.  (If this was some random user, I'd be more willing
to assign speculative blame to the distribution, but ESR is certainly
an advanced hacker, and I would expect his system has been extensively
monkeyed with.)

  Looking beyond "The Life and Times of Eric Raymond", I do think
*your* points are very good ones.  The whole point of a distribution
is to make things easier (for varying definitions of "easy").  If
that's not working, things are broken.

  In response to the source/binary discussion:

  Building from source *does* bypass a lot of problems.  It has been
suggested in the past that something like a cross between BSD ports
and RPM might be a good solution for many problems.  Something that,
with one simple command, could automatically download all the needed
source packages, configure, build, and install them, without scary
looking terminal windows or the need to edit configuration files by
hand.

  However, the "build most things from source" solution is not without
issues itself.  It it slower than binary packages (imagine installing
the first GNOME package this way -- please wait while we build the
world from source).  It's largely incompatible with the world of
closed-source, binary-only software.  Depending on the user, that
might be considered a feature, or a fatal flaw.  It can also make
testing/SCM/support a real nightmare, as now every system can have a
slightly different configuration.

-- Ben