On Sun, 25 Mar 2001, Tom Rauschenbach wrote:
> Wow, I can't remember being called on the carpet better then this. (BTW:
> What the hell does "called on the carpet" mean ?)
I believe it is a reference to being called into an office with (expensive)
carpeting on the floor, where the manager then proceeds to lecture you from
behind his desk. (Yes, I'm just a wealth of useless facts. ;-)
> Different is fine when the difference is meaningful. Deviation from a
> standard is not different, its broken.
What standard?
A distro vendor goes out and collects a bunch of packages from the net. As
released by the original author, most of these packages do not have reasonable
defaults. The reasonable defaults that do exist are inconsistent with each
other. Each distro vendor has to pick their own way, and then configure each
package to use it.
> I don't expect nuts of a certain thread pitch to mate with bolts of a
> different thread pitch. I just want to be able to go to the hardware
> store and find bolts and nuts that match.
To continue your analogy: In the Open Source world, the bolts come without
threading. You can go to a value-added reseller, like Red Hat Hardware, and
get the bolts pre-threaded, but there is no promise that nuts from SuSE
Industrial Supply will fit Red Hat bolts. Recently, the LSB (Linux Supply
Board) has suggested a set of standard thread sizes. Vendors have started
moving over to these standard sizes, but now bolts you bought last year might
not fit the new nuts, so they are having problems with backwards compatibility.
Furthermore, the LSB says nothing about screw heads, so we've still got the
problem of Red Hat making their own screwdrivers.
TANSTAAFL. :-)
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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