gentoo - wow!! - progress

[dep]

begin  Collins's  quote:

| 1) You have a fanatic allegiance to a set of standards that no one
| anywhere has completely implemented and seem to have a (from my
| standpoint) somewhat naive belief that implementation of the fhs is
| some sort of magic bullet that will guarantee world dominance for
| linux.

you're guilty here of a terrible rhetorical fallacy: at no point did i 
say that adoption of the fhs would certify the health and well being 
if linux. what i *did* say is that the lack of adoption of the fhs 
would certify the failure of linux through fragmentation. (i tried 
your trick when i was five, by saying that it was ridiculous to 
suppose that if i got that smallpox vaccination i would live forever. 
it didn't work then, either, and i promptly abandoned it as too 
transparent for use, and have not returned to it.)

| 2) The words "even a minimal set of standards" keep cropping up.
| There are quite a few minimal standards, and most of them seem to
| be coalescing around the spirit of the fhs if not the letter.

well, the file structure of gentoo is not among them.

| Unfortunately, you seem to be enraged by the fact that a distro
| that does not dot every i and ross every t in exactly the same
| fashion can be moderately successful.

again you mischaracterize. i could not give a toot one way or the 
other about gentoo but for the fact that so long as it flings down 
and dances upon the fhs, i will not consider it a distribution worth 
taking seriously. now, gentoo is entirely right in not giving a toot 
about my opinion of it. which is that it is a novelty distribution.

| 3) I sincerely doubt that anything (be it fhs or whatever) will
| slow the onslaught of RedHat.  They have always had the M$ bent of
| dominion.  All I can say here is that better RedHat linux than no
| linux.  The fhs filesystem and maintenance structure basically
| incorporates the RedHat way of doing things, so I fail to see why
| you believe this is a bad thing.

establishment of an fhs that in turn establishes a standard linux that 
among other things binds no one to a particular distribution for such 
things as binary packages will go a long way toward blunting the red 
hat dominance of linux, because thereafter there would be linux and 
red hat linux. which would in and of itself pressure red hat to join 
the club -- something that imho unitedlinux missed the opportunity of 
doing by dissing the existing user base.

what i believe is a bad thing is for any company or distribution to 
*control* linux, as red hat effectively does now. because any one 
company can be bought, and rightfully so. the lone hope of 
diminishing red hat's influence is to establish and adhere to a set 
of utterly open standards, not to go off on flaky toy distributional 
lunacy. unitedlinux came very close, as i said, until that part about 
users going to hell.

| 4) You are very right.  I haven't been in the linux game longer
| than a few years.  In that span of time I haven't reached that
| enlightened state of bliss where I believe that I know the right
| (and the only permitted) approach for everyone else, and I hope I
| never reach that state.

no, but you have reached the "enlightened state of bliss" as that term 
has come to be commonly used, with reference to gentoo.

| 5) In spite of your diatribes against some aspect of almost every
| distro, I have yet to hear any concrete examples of things that
| cannot be done that you (or anyone else) needs to do.  What
| packages are you unable to install because one distro uses the /usr
| hierarchy and another distro uses the /opt hierarchy?  What
| difference does it make if one distro uses BSD based boot scripts,
| another System V, and another dependancy based boot scripts?  For,
| example, adherance to the fhs is not going to cure the rampant
| dependancies on specific levels of library support that make many
| products so difficult to install. It's not going to change the fact
| that averytime glibc changes, we're all screwed.

no. and that smallpox vaccination didn't guarantee that i would not be 
crushed by a meteorite that very day. but it did make sure that i 
would not be getting smallpox anytime soon. i appreciate your lack of 
understanding of the importance of the fhs, even as i wish you 
appreciated your lack of understanding of the importance of the fhs.

| 6) Put your money where your mouth is.  If Slackware or gentoo (or
| pick any non-commercial distro) has flaws that you would like to
| see corrected, come down out of your ivory tower, put up the
| distro, work with it, learn its pluses and minuses, join the
| developer mailing list, discuss the supposed flaws with the
| developers, and be a creative part of producing something better. 
| Sitting on the sidelines and carping doesn't cut it, IMO.  When
| you've put your blood, sweat, and tears into the fight and you have
| an fhs-pure distro, let us know.

c'mon. what a crock. yammering "gentoo" over and over to the extent 
that the list is diminished because members heard that particular 
mantra until they hanged themselves is not contributing to anything. 
your argument above is the equivalent of saying "if you don't like 
the president, go and start your own country." it is the standard 
reply of the cornered distributional zealot.

| 7) When I first encountered the gentoo distro, the slogan "novelty
| distribution" (as you sescribed it) was definitely appropriate. 
| Since that time I've watched the product develop into a very useful
| offering.  The world wide team of developers that are now producing
| gentoo have no time for finding fault with other distros - they're
| too busy making their product the best that it can be.  If that
| best is a "gentoo system that employs linux software," (as you
| described it), then so be it.  The gentoo motto could be that of
| the little train that said: "I knew I could ..." over and over as
| it climbed the hill. You seem to be stuck at "Whatever it is, I'm
| against it."

okay. a novelty distribution based on a children's cartoon book. that 
has lots of people working on it. feel better?
-- 
dep

http://www.linuxandmain.com -- outside the box, barely within the 
envelope, and no animated paperclip anywhere.