Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: community spirit

[Jacob Gorm Hansen]

Nikolai Weibull wrote:

> Yes, but all these choices are irrelevant if you simply write a wrapper
> around tla as it stands now.  There's really no need for a code fork to
> deal with these aspects.  I mean, sure pika-escaping may be annoying,
> but if you write a wrapper, you can easily convert them (that's kind of
> the point after all).

I don't think having n wrappers in people's favorite scripting languages 
makes much sense. I would like one binary that I can easily install on 
any kind of system, without being root, and without having to install 
tons* of library-files as well.

I also think the use of wrappers will fragment the community, it is 
already quite common to have a newbie user ask something like:

Q: How do I achieve X, where X is something utterly trivial in other 
rc-tools (like extract a standard patch)?

A: Use "fancywrapper foo"!

-- which is useless unless one chooses to install fancywrapper, with 
it's 1000+ files of dependencies.

I love Arch, but I think it should optimize more for the common case. I 
am running Ubuntu here, and I think it kicks. If Canonical have decided 
that they want to contribute to Arch, thats simply great news. If Arch 
is supposed to be a 'community' project, I think it is perfectly fair to 
announce their involvement to the entire community at once, rather than 
to a select few behind the scenes.

Jacob


*) For instance, on my workstation:

cd /usr/lib/python2.3
find -type f | wc -l

yields 1312 files.