On Fri, 15 May 2009 20:29:11 +0200 Mate Nagy <mn...@port70.net> wrote:
> > I cannot understand GNU software. ls or cat source in GNU is scary, > > glibc is even worse. The old UNIX utilities or Plan9 ones have a > > simplicity which GNU lacks. I don't have anything against the GPL > > license, but I prefer less restrictive licenses. And, of course, I > > don't like rms. > i don't know what's up with this newfangled popular hate for GNU > software. The GNU userland is a thousand times more comfortable and > usable than old unix, not least because some utils even have >features< > (imagine that), while the old unix tools were simplistic hackjobs. > > Minimalism is a good thing to consider while developing software, but > obsessing about it is no better than with anything else. I'm as annoyed > with huge monstrous software like OpenOffice or Gnome or even Firefox as > anyone, but wanting to take away the features of the CLI userland that > make it comfortable is mad. Would you use dash instead of zsh as an > everyday shell? > > At a risk of being boring, I'll say that the same argument can be made > about text editors: VIM is quite bloated and big, but it's better than > any small text editor; because text editing is one of those typical > tasks that cannot be comfortable without a million features that are in > no way related to each other. Even if someone writes a really small, > elegant, suckless editor core, it will be unusable until: > - it gets encoding handling right (internal, file, terminal) > - word wrapping (disabled, enabled, soft, hard...) > - syntax highlighting and autoindent, for C, Python, Lisp... > - all possible tab behaviors (soft, hard, half,...) > - autocompletion, ctags integration > These are just the absolutely necessary basics, and if you implement > these, you already have a multi-ten-thousand line application. > Sucklessness goes through the window. > (Yes, there are people who make do with mcedit, but.. come on.) > > I say dwm (for example) is good because it's good, not because it's > suckless. The sucklessness is certainly part of its goodness, but not > all. If it was uncomfortable, would anyone use it? and it's still only > marginably usable with a multi-monitor configuration - proper handling of > this would require adding of this "bloat" everyone hates so much. > > Best regards, > Mate > PS. am not trolling :) > That't what I wanted to say. :D
