Can I just soapbox once more briefly - there is nothing more annoying and lame within the linux realm than these moronic microsoft-esque 'bla is now deprecated' messages or scenarios involving chunderous deprecation. First, one that i think is from read hat and is now dead. let's hope. It illustrates the point -- from long ago in late 1998, I first came across the following on a RH 5.1 system: ps - is now deprecated, use ps from now on I about launched a brick at my monitor. Who were these red hat bozos and what were they lecturing me about using ps? especially since AFAIK, neither Sys V or BSD has this issue. It seemed (and seems) entirely thought up by concerns other than those that use tools for functional reasons. It seems like someone wanted to make the manual easier to write. Second, the way rm was changed, including on my current Mandrake 7.1, to default to essentially requiring rm -rf to do the work of what rm does on sparc and bsd and used to do on linux til the redhat horde arrived. Kids, how many times have you typed rm -rf and blown away a directory tree when you only intended to remove a file or files. The point of the rf flag to rm was it was supposed to be rarely invoked. By making rm nag, you cause rm -rf to be the norm. It's far more catastrophic if mistakes happen than rm. Fix it til it's broke, then look up in amazement. Finally.. this whole conf.modules / modules.conf thing. Kudos to you for posting it. This is a linux long-standing gotcha, ever since the modules entity came out. If you are going to ''deprecate'' a file and remove it, please actually do all the work of testing every potential fail point in your install suite .. don't just hang a sign up that says 'deprecations to the rear' then go home. Because the result will be yet again something that will run right until someone reads a HOWTO from 1998, or an info that hasn't lately been maintained, or even a (deprecated) man page, and once they do, will be royally confused, possibly annoyed, and probably longing either for the days when Microsoft did everything for them, or else when slackware was the only linux distro, a handful of conf files easily tuned any linux system. The savvy will fix, the rest will do exactly what you apparently were trying to prevent -- get frustrated with their 'computing desktop experience.' And don't forget those of us that just don't have time to go to school on a wildly new set of problems every time a new release comes out. (but from time to time have loads of time to complain that others should, lol) That should do it, my meds have arrived. Thanks for listening, keep up the great work. And looks like I will have to find a mandrake linux user group that is both small enough to be practical, yet large enough not to be stagnant. Anybody know of one ? (a mandrake sys admins mail list, with discussions above the level of newbie, yet with enough response to actually be useful, as this list is usually too busy just bug hunting .. i will check your web page and go from there.) -Dave Dennis Seattle WA
