Hey, On 23 May 2011 04:36, Noah Birnel <nbir...@gmail.com> wrote: > Your Makefile, though, is GNU-dependant.
Really, which part? It seems to work with NetBSD make. On 23 May 2011 09:16, Mate Nagy <mn...@port70.net> wrote: > please, please don't take this as a troll - it's just a personal > feeling... but I do feel that the suckless project is at its best when > it produces fantastically useful minimalistic software like dwm. > > These days it seems a moronic, unproductive crusade on features and > rewriting completely serviceable utilities to be much worse is more popular. I completely understand the sentiment. Just the other day on #suckless I was saying, the reason why dwm and dmenu are so good is they bring something new in terms of usability. Things like surf do not, they just have fewer features. So where does this fit in? Okay, this is basically my computing tactic: simplifying my operating system to the point where I can actually understand what on Earth is going on. When I use a system like Ubuntu and Gnome, when shit breaks I have no idea what went wrong, and I tend to end up reinstalling everything. When I use a system like Debian and dwm, when shit breaks I say, "ohhh," and fix it, and it takes a couple of seconds. (X is an exception.) The simpler the internals, the easier it is to use, not because of anything on the surface -- though the manuals are rather easier to read -- but because you can clearly visualise the mechanisms inside whatever tools you are using. So I hope that explains my view on the subject. I agree that dwm and friends are "suckless at its best", but this sort of paring is necessary to build on my relationship with my computer as a whole: I don't understand how it all works, so instead of spending the next decade creating a mental image of the system, I'll just make my own, thus bringing its complexity within the boundaries of my own ken. (Is that a pun? I don't know.) I don't know how others live with the complexity of their system, but I suspect it involves Perl and duct-tape. :p On 23 May 2011 09:42, Szabolcs Nagy <n...@port70.net> wrote: > scripts will break Yeah, when I started out I wanted to make it entirely POSIX, but once I saw the flaggishness of the POSIX standard I decided I'd just make a compromise. This will begin as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, standard utilities, and maybe we can get to a point where a static distro like Stali can use only them. I don't know about you, but I could genuinely live without autoconf on my laptop. Thanks, cls
