Stewart Stremler said:
> begin quoting Neil Schneider as of Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 10:04:37AM -0800:
>> Stewart Stremler said:
<SNIP>
> One should try to recognize ones own zealotry and take appropriate
> measures to account for it coloring your attitudes. I am a zealot
> in the "it's the user's computer, it should be the user's choice!"
> area, which is often raises some technically difficult problems.
It should at least be the sysadmin's choice, so they can address the technical
difficulties for the users. It goes pretty far beyond choice of shell.
Anecdote: My house has only Linux PCs. My wife, and 3 of my kids (9,7,3) all
use it
happily (although I suspect my wife feels like she's missing something by not
using
windows, she is still fairly supportive). The print system in X used to mean
that
when you got the print dialog for an application, you simply entered the
appropriate
"lpr" command. The admin could do it, or as needed, the user could be told,
"just
paste this command in that box". However, by way of making things easier,
there are
now scads of printing front ends which try to allow the end user to install
drivers,
and the simple line command box doesn't appear in any of the print dialogs for
popular apps (that I've seen). More choice, but implemented in a way that
obscures
usefulness and obstructs the admin from addressing the complexity _for_ the
user.
>> You seem to see a conspiracy, where I don't.
>
> No, I see an _attitude_.
>
> It's not a conspiracy. It's just a prevailing attitude. An implict
> arrogance that comes from controlling a majority of the mind-share.
> It's the same attitude that Microsofties have -- "this is the way it
> is, everyone should do it our way, you're allowed to be different if
> you want to work at it but you're stupid to do so, so just suck it
> up and learn to love it."
>
<SNIP>
What is alternately described as arrogance or attitude above, is also often
referred
to as "common sense". I don't mean that in a particularly positive way. The
attitudes and actions, arrogant or not, are a result of what those people
believe to
be good/true in such an *obvious* way, that it prevents deep consideration from
ever
really occurring.
If software, from the kernel to the lamest javascript, is going to be designed
for
the good of the user and sysadmin, then it requires more than just
introspection.
It also means trying to understand what other kinds of problem spaces there are
(as
Stew alluded to), and allowing for human creativity in solving them.
Seems to me that it also sometimes requires a rather sacrificial willingness to
do
some extra work in designing and coding so as to avoid obstructing that
creativity.
That extra work may be a significant barrier even after all the really hard
work of
thinking it through is done (not that it should ever be considered "done").
>
>> Every linux system I've
>> every set up had a choice of shells. The default is bash. There has to
>> be a default,
>
<SNIP>
> Okay, so geeks are lazy, and they write tools to automate even the
> simplest tasks, so we get adduser and useradd. And as good little
> programs go, a missing argument gets a default. (I think that the
> default should be /bin/false, but again, that's me...) So if a default
> is truly desired (aside from the sensible option), then surely that
> should be a choice when installing the system? ("Default User Shell")
>
I tried to use /bin/false as my default shell. It's featureless, and I just
couldn't do anything with it. ;-)
<SNIP>
> If I was looking for new-and-improved, I'd go with zsh.
>
I'm _slowly_ moving to zsh. Some things require more effort to learn than they
seem
to be worth at first blush, especially if you already have a tool that suffices
95%
of the time. Fortunately I enjoy the learning. I just need more time (better
memory wouldn't hurt :-) ).
syntaxman o _ _ _
_o /\_ _ \\o (_)\__/o (_)
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(_)>(_) (_) (_) (_) (_)' _\o_
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