Zaheer,
Even in the case of source-only packages, you can't trust them all (do you
read the code of all the packages u compile). But at least theoritically it
is safe from backdoors... so do we hope.
You can't dream of a uni-package distro; 'coz someday somebody is going to
break ur day. We (as we're Debian freaks) know .deb is great and apt-get can
be used to intstall the entire universe. And I don't blaim rpm. Still Gentoo
guys think Portage is the norm. Somewhere someguy (name not known) created
autopackage 'cos he thinks that is norm.
Even if we distrust and detest Click 'N Run. Linspire users find it a great
boon. And who can say .deb won't be reimplemented into a non-backward
compatiable format? (I hope you know .deb 1.0 and the new .deb format which
uses 'ar' format are incompatiable). RPM users think their format is
futuristic 'cos they use 'cpio' which claims to be much more superior (at
least to them) than 'ar', 'tar', and so forth.
I personally think there's nothing as sweet as Autoconf and Automake. But
still the learning curve is steep.
Even Debian refused to join the UnitedLinux group 'cos of the package issue.
And trust me.. there ain't no such thing as a Linux Power User (those LFY
guys are misleading you). AFAIK, and AFAIC, there are newbies (or GNUbies):
who have a deep passion and affinity to reach the blue yonder.
Then comes the (l)users, which pester all of us with useless pain-in-the-a**
sysadmins, who can fight a bit with basic knowledge of their systems
Finally there are kernel manglers who grope thru device driver sources for
time pass...
Each of them are incomplete in their knowlege: eg, kernel mongers know
nothing about changing SVG wall papers in the latest KDE, sysadmins can't tell
the diff between a userspace malloc() and kmalloc() (well sometimes). users
can't tell if the file is a .so or .ko and so on...
Only the so -called demigods can be a little bit know-it-all.
There was a time when Linus Torvalds (somewhere after releasing some 0.98
kernel) didn't know what or how to use sprintf() in C. This is a true
incident!
So my point is this: we cant know everything. Zilch. Nada.
Only time will lead us to enlightenment. For the time being forget Desktop
Linux, forget flashy GUIs, forget KDE and Enlightenment. Those are
hindrances in our path to Nirvana. The most userfriendly thing here is bash
prompt.
All Ye Hackers, Unite!
Regards,
Mahesh Aravind
PS: For those of you, who want to whip me after reading this rant is welcome
to the next iLUG meeting... (hey, how do one get Police protection?)
Zaheer Mohamed Kozhakkaniyil <zaheermk at email.com> wrote: Hello Sir and dear
GNUers,
Thanks for the reply... your replies are beginning to
get me to think a bit different... as Sir said, do not trust all sites,
true... but you could / should trust the developers' sites / product
homepages, right? Now, what I meant was that instead of the developer offering
three .rpm (Redhat, Suse, Mandriva), two .deb (Debian and Ubuntu), one .tgz
(Slackware) etc..., if he / she offers one uniform distro-independent package,
won't it be great, for him as well as us?..... There I go again, right? Yes. I
know it is easier said than done... but do you all atleast agree with me? If
that is the case, then one day we can hope that this will be a reality where
one single package can be used in all the distros. This will also make it much
easier to present the GNU/Linux case to the hardware (portable players,
digital cameras, high-end cellphones etc. as soon as they are launched) driver
developers, where they can pack a single package which can used by
the whole community.
And as Mahesh Aravind said there might not be much of an
intermediate GNU/Linux users group. Thinking in that direction now.....
---------------------------------
Yahoo! Mail
Bring photos to life! New PhotoMail makes sharing a breeze.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
http://ilug-cochin.org/pipermail/mailinglist_ilug-cochin.org/attachments/20060316/1272ca1c/attachment.htm
