Well said! On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, David Dennis wrote: > 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 -- ------------------------------------------------------ Peter Ruskin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Wrexham, UK KDE - the professionals' choice ------------------------------------------------------
