X and fonts

[Collins Richey]

On Sun, 27 Apr 2003 09:13:01 -0400
dep <dep at linuxandmain.com> wrote:

[ snips ]


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


Nothing new here.  Even though I got reasonable mileage out of a recent
Redhat release, I've always said that Redhat is the Microsoft of the
linux world, meaning that deceptive practices are a part of their
offering (reference "tie users to binaries from their own
distribution").  Now it looks like SuSE is following suit.  I'll stick
with Slack or Gentoo, thank you very much.

> [success with glibc updates] 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.
> 

<rant>
Yes, the open software practice that I've complained about most
vociferously over the years is this very thing.  Whether it's the
kernel, glibc, or any desktop offering, all open software developers
feel the need to reeinvent the wheel at depressingly frequent intervals,
so that older versions are left in the dust.  Microsoft does this for
economic (and evil) reasons; what's our excuse?  IBM would have been out
of business years ago if every new release of MVS or VM rendered all its
prior software useless.
</rant>

There, I feel better now.

-- 
Collins Richey - Denver Area
gentoo stable - ext3