[svlug] SuSE root prob

[Bevan Schroeder]

On Wed, 18 Nov 1998, Tom Harincar wrote:

> Javlik wrote:
> >
> >    It is stupid and arrogant to restrict that which has formerly been
> >allowed, in any field, when that would impact a lot of prior work,
> >requiting it be modified.
> >
> You are quite right but I suggest RH is equally guilty although
> maybe not on your  particular issue.  I just upgraded from 5.1 to
> 5.2 and now one of my old applications is broken.  IMHO, Redhat is
> not necessarily guilty of arrogance or stupidity but simply of bad
> quality control.  In their urgency to generate revenue with a
> relatively minor upgrade, they have not done the necessary homework
> to make sure 3rd party applications will continue to run without a
> problem, or, at minimum, providing the documentation as to changes
> which might cause such a problem.

Ok, hold on a sec...  I think this is being unfair.
Linux tries to please all the people all the time.  As we all know, this
can't be done.  It does its best.  This sometimes means changing standards
and breaking old stuff when it's the Right Thing.  The most recent example
I know of is sound in the kernel, which apparently broke Quake and
RealPlayer.  But it fixed a genuine bug in the sound (according to Alan
Cox) so it's the apps that are broken, not the kernel.  The same is very
true of Javilk's example, if he's using a configuration tool instead of
editing /etc/passwd by hand (some of the people calling themselves
"sysadmins" these days...sheesh... ;)  - the tool is broken, not Suse.
Suse didn't design the password model, and if you can't change their
distribution enough to make it do what you want, you need to learn more
about their distribution, and adminning in general.  Your linux
installation should not be a black box.

RedHat and Suse are just distributions.  They take other people's work and
try to make it fit together as best they can.  But they also want to bring
you new features.  If RedHat ships with a new libjpeg, any apps you keep
that relied on the old libjpeg will break, because libjpeg is dumb that
way.  But new apps you build will get the features of the new library.
This is what most people want to get in an upgrade from RedHat.

Javilk, _your_comment_ is stupid and arrogant.  If the developers in the
linux realm followed that logic, all new apps would have to rely on broken
designs, instead of forcing the old apps to fix themselves to work with
the new designs.  If you're going to upgrade to a newer something, you
have to expect to hit problems.  Having installing glibc by hand, I find
the whining I'm hearing here a bit pathetic.  Compare the number
of problems you're hitting to the ones you might be having with a
Microsoft "upgrade" such as win95 -> 98   (*shudder*)
Better yet, compare the number of benefits.

-bevan


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