On Friday, 13 September 2013 at 22:29:28 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
The only time I've actually had trouble with linux binaries is
when there's a problem with libc upgrades
The biggest offender for my home computer is gtk and glib. libc
can be painful too - especially with work computers that stick to
a particular version in the name of stability (I don't blame
them, updating software is an exercise in pain. Even when they
don't outright break things, so often they've changed it, now it
sucks.).
But all those glib whatevers really kill me.
On Windows, when
installing stuff I used to always get messages like "this
installer
That's not such a problem anymore since Vista. The system does
some magic rewrites so those naughty programs think they are
writing to system folders, but are actually pretty isolated.
Still worries me on Linux though! "just run sudo make install",
and trust you not to do anything wrong? Nope!
On both systems, I don't like installing programs. Whenever I
can, I like to keep the application in its own folder and run it
as my limited user account only (e.g., unzip dmd.zip, run
./dmd2/linux/bin32/dmd. it just worked! and any versions can live
side by side! and it didn't overwrite anything else another
program might rely on! WIN!)
Having said that, though, linux *is* more geared to building
from source than anything else
That'd be great if you didn't have to recreate the original
author's environment on your computer, or wait seemingly forever
for ./configure to run, then wait forever again for make to run,
just to see if the program even does what you want it to do.
This is why my D programs usually just have a few files you can
drop in. So I say "get my simpledisplay.d and color.d" and you
don't have to install it, you don't have to download the same
libraries I have, you just grab those two files and
dmd yourapp.d simpledisplay.d color.d
and boom, it *should* work. While I do have some other libs
installed, various C headers and so forth, I think it is
unreasonable to ask you, my user, to have all that too.
If modularity and DRY are at odds, I prefer to err on the side of
fewer dependencies.
but linux's customizability means
eh to an extent yes, but my custom window manager shouldn't mean
your notepad program doesn't work. Maybe some special features
won't be the same, but my preference in one location shouldn't
break core functionality in another. There is a reasonable common
denominator here - people don't customize their ELF loaders
(much). They don't hack their kernels so the syscall numbers
don't match. Those things actually work, so nobody really cares.
Why do people use other sound servers/modules or gui libraries?
Because the default is broken. Not because they disagree, but
because it is *broken*. So then everyone does their own fixes to
work around it... and that leads to pain.
So it isn't end user customizability that cause the problem. It
is mid-user patching a broken core.
Isn't this thread already [OT]? ;-)
yeah but it wasn't meant to be a rant thread! oh well.
