Hi Colin, I disagree with your oppinion. Partially you are right, since it should be the goal of Ubuntu to provide a system that already contains everything the user needs, thus making it obsolete to install or even compile something of ones own. But on the otherhand the Linux and FOSS community lives because of the diversity of OpenSource. Even though Ubuntu contains already alot of packages and there are many 3rd party PPA's available, but there will always be software on the net that can be downloaded as source code to be compiled by one self. This is not because you developers have failed, but because of the simple reason that someone who has written a small application simply can not provide packages for every distribution and the software might be too small, or not popular enought to make it into the official Ubuntu repositories.
I can understand that it might be too much work to provide individual feed back for each error message to tell the user what package to reinstall as this would probably need a database that provides the conversion of, for example "-lgmp" to "libgmp3-dev". But still the point remains that "-lgmp" is very undescriptive. If you would at least change "-lgmp" to "Library: gmp" or something it would give people a starting point. Consider that many people don't write the makefiles and code by them self but still want to download other peoples code and compile it by them self. People even might know C/C++ or have a well enough understanding of how the systems work, but are then put off because the y don't understand the linking process. If they run into problems because a simple library is missing this gives unnecessary frustration to users. Colin Watson wrote: > ld error messages are directed at developers, not at end users; there is > no reasonable way to make all possible compiler/linker error messages > end-user-friendly. If beginners who don't understand this kind of thing > are having to compile software, we've already failed. > -- Very user unfriendly ld error messages https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/428880 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
