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

[Thomas Lord]

    > From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>

    > But in general, dependency == reuse of a module, which in some
    > circles in considered an important element of "proper
    > engineering".  I assume that's not news to you!

It's hard to make the distinction between good and bad reuse but I
think the distinction is pretty darn real (even if a bit fuzzy around
the edges).

Rule of thumb: Reuse is a virtue if and only the resulting work
remains "human scale" -- i.e., there is an overall design coherence
and any ambitious+educated person can deal confidently with any part
of the system they encounter.

A typical GNU/* system GUI package utterly fails that test, in my
experience, to name just one class of examples.  Few of them build in
any but a very narrow range of environments without human
intervention.  Many of them require that this or that dependency
package be installed --- so that installing two of these GUI packages
usually involves having installed multiple versions of their
dependencies.   And then internally to the code of these systems
themselves, well, I claim that nobody in the world is a master of most
of these systems:  people just keep patching them and praying and
nursing their own insane pet theories about how they function.



    >     Jacob> The only clear winner here is Dell. And perhaps Microsoft,
    >     Jacob> who can afford to do proper software engineering.

    > AFAICT this bloat is what the users want and expect.  

You give up too easily.  Users want and expect easy-to-use rich
functionality.   It's just that the bloat crap is the only way it has
ever been offered to them.

And don't give me any pseudo-darwinian nonsense about how, therefore,
the bloat crap one the competition: it was (and remains) an (hugely)
economically stacked competition, largely a result of the highest
level PHBs being too clueless about software to spend intelligently.

It wouldn't even be worth mentioning these issues except that the PHB
incompetence puts, and I'm not exaggerating, civilization itself at
risk.   I have little or no more patience for those bozos.   They
simultaneously encourage more and more of civilization to depend,
utterly, on their products --- and take /no/ demostrable care about
the wisdom of such dependency.   Jackasses.

-t