On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 1:21 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: <SNIP> > Life is full of silly and not-so-silly conventions and /dev/dvd is one > of them. It has no good reason to be there, and equally no good reason > to not be there, but you already fixed your stuff to make it do what > you want. <SNIP> > -- > Alan McKinnon
Alan, Maybe in the future you'll consider this story: For your entertainment, please imagine an 82 year old woman who, unknown to anyone, has somehow gone beyond simple web browsing and email and managed to teach herself to watch a DVD on her Gentoo laptop. Possibly she is hard of hearing? This works well for her as she can use headphones and listen at levels that work for her any time of day or night. Once you get your head around that picture, please imagine this user being frustrated for _months_ when her 'no good reason to be there DVD' goes away. This user feels, for no good technical reason, that she has somehow hurt her computer and worse worries about the costs of fixing it. She remains silent, doesn't ask for help and loses access to something that she enjoys all because someone in the dev community decides to 'make a change'. Not every user (of Gentoo or any other distro) lives in the rarefied world of a Linux Sys Admin, much less the far more lowly and infinitely more mundane world I inhabit. My experience is that people almost always need a little help and almost never ask. Over and out, Mark
