X and fonts

[Net Llama!]

On 04/27/03 06:13, dep wrote:
> begin  Ian Stephen's  quote:
> | Questions I am left with now are whether the up2date I did last
> | night caused this or is that just a coincidence?  What would have
> | made /var/lib/xkb disappear?  What did reinstalling base-fonts do? 
> | Looking at /etc/X11/fs/config and the font paths contained in that
> | file's catalogue section provides no clues (at least not that I
> | see).
> 
> the newest trick undertaken by distributions -- i've been screaming 
> bloody murder years about the move in this direction -- is to screw 
> around with xfree86 such that anything you know about it is no longer 
> true. the pinnacle (thusfar) that i've seen is that for unspecified 
> security reasons, the xfree 4.30 shipped with suse 8.2 is *not* 
> replaceable by xfree that you compile yourself; the latter won't 
> work. in that the chief issue in the discussion of that involved xdm, 
> i suspect that red hat is doing something similar. at minimum they've 
> made it all a lot more complicated than it ought to be, and they have 
> not bothered to tell anyone what they've done.

No, they're not.  Redhat isn't as dumb as SuSE apparently, because i've 
built my own XFree86 and replaced Redhat's on 7.2, 7.3, and 9, and not 
had a single problem.

> it sounds as if red hat is up to similar monkeyshines, such that they 
> have now achieved a degree of incompatibility with themselves.

No.

> | I learned some time back not to play willy-nilly with things like
> | glibc.  Should I not even assume that up2date will update them
> | safely? Is it better not to update those without a specific reason
> | to do so?
> 
> i have successfully updated glibc and i have had updating glibc break 
> everything on the machine. i utterly destroyed my caldera 2.4 install 
> a couple years ago by such an update. it depends on the degree of 
> backward compatibility in the new version. one of the greatest 
> weaknesses in things linux is the view that backward compatibility is 
> an insignificant luxury. ask anyone who bought the corel applications 
> suite.

I did the same on Caldera, and didnt' have a single problem.

> the idea, seems to me, is to tie users to binaries from one's 
> distribution, so that ultimately one will have to subscribe to an 
> update service. now you report that red hat has taken this a step 
> beyond what works.
> 
> linux was a lot easier back when it was too difficult to use.

Sounds like its still that way for you dep.  While its nice & convenient 
to slander Redhat, it would be better if you actually had experience 
with a recent Redhat release before you attacked them without merit.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                       	       netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo: 		    http://netllama.ipfox.com

   8:15am  up 49 days,  7:42,  3 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00