Re: GnuTLS for W32

[chad]

On Jan 5, 2012, at 12:30 PM, Juanma Barranquero wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 17:19, chad <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> Out of curiosity, do you assemble the pieces of your operating system by hand
> 
> No, because I'm not offered that alternative in the system I use.
> 
>> and manually check for updates yourself?
> 
> I disable automatic checking and do manual checks every now and then, yes.

When you do manual checks, do you run a program that checks for updates, 
downloads them, and then installs them; or do you load up a web browser, visit 
some project pages from memory/bookmarks/etc, and start downloading and 
unpacking zip files?

I certainly don't think that everyone should be *required* to run an automatic 
critical-update-checker, but we're not talking about that - we're talking about 
the default setting.  That might involve you being asked a question once ever 
(something that's been built into emacs at least since I started using in in 
the 18.43 days), or adding a tiny bit of elisp to your set-up before being 
asked.

>> Do you think that most GNU/Linux distributions are too much like `software 
>> as a service' for the same reasons?
> 
> Certainly I don't like much the way GNU/Linux distributions are going.

Ok, I sympathize (I tend to disable auto-updaters on windows systems myself), 
but wasn't the question. I assume that you mention SoaS because you think that 
such systems are opposed to the FSF's and/or GNU project's goals, not just 
because you don't like them.

You asked, ``if your vote counts'', and - to me, at least - your vote 
definitely counts.  I'm trying to understand your reasoning for objecting to a 
default setting that would notify the user about critical issues.  Either I'm 
not understanding what you're saying, or you're saying that the default users 
shouldn't have a feature that many (I'd say `vast majority', but `many' is 
enough) because it might cause you to have to type `n' a few times, and that 
doesn't match what I expect from seeing your efforts on emacs-devel.

>> If you believe that the default user is opposed to this, I'll suggest that 
>> you might not have noticed them all voting with their feet in favor of this 
>> at least a decade ago.  This isn't even the old `Windows Majority', even - I 
>> can't think of a computing system today that meets the criteria ``might run 
>> Emacs 24.2'' and ``does NOT somehow check the network for critical updates 
>> in the default installation''.
> 
> There are plenty of applications, many of them quite new, with no automatic 
> checking and/or upgrading.

I don't want to start a flame-war, but I really don't think this statement is 
true of user software.  Basically everything not hand-hacked on modern 
GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows system has an automatic checking (or checking 
and upgrading) system in place, built in to the application (web browsers, 
office suites, document/imaging systems, and games, for example) or the 
operating system.  To my knowledge, emacs is the *only* software I use under 
windows that doesn't do this, but I don't use windows very often, and mostly 
just for playing certain computer games. Can you suggest a few `user' 
applications that don't?

Perhaps this is a matter of nomenclature, but in my opinion, if the operating 
system's default-run package manager performs such a function, I believe that 
it counts.  Is that's the distinction you're drawing?

*Chad