[plug] boot into shell (a tad offtopic to question)

[Craig Ringer]

On Mon, 2005-07-18 at 03:52 +0800, Mark B wrote:

>     Even for newbies to linux, having a wide range of distributions with
> each having their own standards can be a nightmare, since each distribution
> tends to have their own standard way of doing things, generally undocumented
> or hidden away in man pages.  Developers can't be expected to develop
> software to suite every major distrobutions vendor, becides isn't that the
> distrobution maintainers job?

If you want users to be able to get upgrades and fixes for your
software, then yes you need to support all the major distros at least. I
don't consider "upgrade your whole OS" to be a particularly attractive
thing to have to tell someone who wants the lastest patch release.

That's doubly true when the new version of the OS will still contain a
somewhat old version of your package.

What gets frustrating is that 80% of the problems are with the small
proportion of users who insist on running bizarre distributions you've
never even heard of, then want a binary package. The other 20% are
mostly Gentoo users with randomly broken systems :-P . It's tempting to
tell these people "go use something more standard, or get friendly with
autotools" but really, that's neither nice nor satisfying for anybody
involved.

>     I just don't understand why everyone wants to reinvent the wheel on
> things that have proven to work (apart from boredom), it makes it a pain for
> developers/administrators to make sure config locations follow standards to
> that distrobution and so forth. I guess that encountering these issues are
> to be expected, and should be expected, however that should stay with Linux
> enthusiests who enjoy encountering these problems.

Yep, that's my view. The freedom to experiment is great, but when we're
done experimenting and it turns out that one way is just better or all
approaches can be combined into something satisfactory, can we settle on
just one way to do it please?

Easier said than done, I know, but that's still how I wish it'd go. If
only wishes counted for something ;-)

--
Craig Ringer