[ Ah, I love nothing better than a lengthy rant! Here's a lengthy
reply to go with it... ]
On May 18, 2007, at 10:57 AM, Bill Hernandez wrote:
Over time I've installed so many different versions software
(mostly Apache, php, pgsql, and a myriad of dependencies) in the
form of binaries & source installs on my workstation, and on the
servers that after a while I began to feel that I had no clue
what's what, or what was where, a big unruly mix and match...
That's kind of a "doctor, it hurts when I bend my elbow backwards!"
complaint, but I will say that if there was proper package management
on the platform and a clear notion of "software overlays" somehow
embedded into the whole process of adding/updating/removing packages,
your elbow probably wouldn't hurt nearly so much. However, given
that such a system is really nothing more than a gleam in various
people's eyes right now and would take a lot of engineering and time
to get really right, even if we were to start on it tomorrow, you'll
probably have to learn how to simply manage that pain for the
forseeable future if bending your elbow that way is something you're
bound and determined to do.
Some people put a great deal of effort into creating these
binaries, and for the most part grateful as you were that someone
took the time, they never quite solved the problem.
That problem being... ? There's a difference between having a
specific, demonstrable need for version X of package Y (because it
contains, at a minimum, necessary new feature Z) and wanting the
latest shiny object because, well, it's shiny and you take it as holy
writ that if version X is good then version X+1 must CLEARLY be
better. The former case is defensible, the 2nd just makes one look
like a software magpie.
Sometimes when you get involved in what you feel is going to be a
30 minute deal, and three days later at 3:15 am you've installed a
boat-load of dependent software, you're on the last leg and the
last one just refuses to compile with some cryptic message. You
begin to feel like you're inside a huge snowball rolling down the
mountain totally out of control, and there's a big giant Sequoia at
the bottom, and you just know it's got you name on it.
Yeah, that can certainly be frustrating, but I don't think anybody
ever promised that compiling and installing your own bits from source
was ever going to exactly be EASY either!
Let me offer an analogy specifically tailored to someone with your
stated background: Consider all those folks who buy experimental
aircraft kits - you know the kind, advertised in the back of just
about every aviation magazine being published today. What notion
could be more appealing to one's imagination than zooming around in a
self-built 200+hp high-performance experimental aircraft, built for
pennies in comparison to the cost of a new Cessna and certainly
sexier than the more pedestrian offerings down at the local flying
school? I'm sure a lot of guys have fallen head-over-heels in love
with the notion and rushed right out to buy the plans and perhaps
even the first batch of parts, only to have reality set in with all
the rude shock of a cold, dead fish right across the face just as
soon as they started reading those plans and realized that they were
looking at easily 3000 hours worth of fabrication work and a serious
long-term commitment to seeing the project to completion, during
which time they'd need to completely take over the garage and learn
all sorts of new skills, like working with exotic composites, wiring
control systems, using specialized tools, etc. To make it even more
disheartening, even after all THAT was done they'd still have to
learn how to fly the thing, experimental aircraft not being
particularly well-known for being forgiving of mistakes made in the
air (just ask John Denver).
Most of those kits sadly sit in various garages, partially or
completely unfinished and my hat is well and truly off to those who
actually do build the complete aircraft, get an air-worthiness
certificate for it and end up actually flying it for any length of
time (without, of course, dying in the process). Your situation is
not that different, unfortunately. If you really want to go down the
route of building your own packaged software then you're also going
to have to learn how to get over the hurdles with the cryptic
messages and the frequent need to modify software until it "ports"
over. If you don't have that kind of patience and resolve then it's
probably better to simply save yourself the agony of even starting
lest you just end up with a mess (not in your garage, at least, but
certainly on your system) and a lot of hours wasted being frustrated.
In summary, it's not a question of intelligence, it's a question of
resolve. I'm sure a lot of those abandoned aircraft kits are owned
by some pretty intelligent guys, some even with solid backgrounds in
aviation, but 3000 hours is still 3000 hours and a lot of folks have
other things to do with their lives (raise families, try not to get
divorced by spending all their time in the garage, etc).
And yeah, to answer your other point, you'd think that in the year
2007 things would be a lot better. You'd also think that people
wouldn't still be flying on Lycoming engines designed back in the
1950's and offering horsepower-to-displacement ratios that most
automobile manufacturers would barf up a kidney at if asked to use in
an automotive role. Some technologies move a hell of a lot more
slowly than you'd expect them to, for reasons too lengthy and
complicated to go into here. Both aviation and software fall into
those categories. We were supposed to be already at Jupiter talking
to HAL-9000 by now too, but hey. As the saying goes: The future
isn't what it used to be.
Even when I installed what should have been a simple install of
"rpl" which does a simple unix replace string, I had to go back and
forth with the author overcoming some error messages until I
finally got it to install correctly. One of the huge problems is
that unless you have the discipline to write excellent notes, and
file them appropriately, so that the next time you need to do this
again on a new machine a year down the road, you're going to be in
for the same problem all over again...
Which is why macports exists. It's essentially nothing more than a
collection of "recipes" that people accumulate by going through that
whole process, the biggest advantage over careful note-taking being
that those recipes can also be followed in an automated fashion for
those who follow in the original porter's footsteps. It's not
perfect, but it's a lot better than starting from scratch. To re-
visit our aviation analogy, it's like buying an experimental aircraft
kit which is simply a completed aircraft delivered in 4 or 5 sections
and a heck of a lot easier to stick together than building one from
scratch plans. It's still not a patch on going down to the Cessna
dealer and picking out a new 172SP with leather upholstery and Garmin
G1000 glass cockpit installed, just quivering and ready to go once
you add gas and oil, but it still beats mixing the fiberglass
yourself by a mile.
[ ... ] So I tend to think that I am not the average user, and I
still run into huge problems
Heh, my father is a retired Pan American pilot with god-only-knows
how many tens of thousands of hours in the air, including a long
stint as an Air Force test pilot at Edwards where he dealt with more
exotic varieties of equipment most of us can imagine, but he still
hands his computer to me when it really gets fubar'd and says
"Goddamn it, I don't know what's wrong with this thing! Please fix
it!" Experience is not necessarily commutative and it's just silly
to imagine that it should be. I can run rings around him on the
computer and I can even fly his piper Aztec, but I'm not even gonna
touch the controls of a 747 whereas he'd be totally comfortable with
the idea of just hopping into one and flying it 7100 miles from LA to
Hong Kong with hardly a moment's notice (and that happens more often
than you'd think or be comfortable with as someone in the back).
Some things take more than book learning, they take hours and hours
of experience and a willingness to beat your head against various
challenges until they stop being challenges and start being things
you solve almost reflexively.
I used to think I was reasonably safe behind the routers/firewalls,
and behind the OSX Server Firewalls until I began reading all the
daily vulnerability reports. [ ... ]
I used to think I was safe at home, too, until I looked at the fact
that I have all these friggin' windows right next to my locked
doors. I think it's important to consider just what you have to
lose in addition to looking at potential vulnerabilities. Sure,
some spammer might want to take over your machine and use it as a
'bot host, and that's actually fairly easy to monitor and check for
(those thousands of outgoing emails tend to be something of a clue).
Otherwise, who really wants into your machine? One assumes you're
not foolish enough to write down all your credit card numbers and
leave them in an unencrypted file named "my-credit-card-numbers.txt",
and if you're worried about identity theft then it's actually a lot
easier to get your SSN and other information from sources EXTERNAL to
your machine, so again, I don't know how much sleep I'd lose over this.
I'm not saying to be complacent, I'm simply saying that any degree of
caution can be taken to extremes if you choose to hyper-focus on any
given threat. I know folks who stockpile weapons for the day when
society breaks down and the hungry, unwashed hoards storm their
compound in order to get at their valuable cache of canned goods,
too, but I don't know if I necessarily want to live my life that way.
When I started doing this, if you were a programmer you could make
really good money.
If you're a GOOD programmer you can still make really good money.
Check out Apple's job site sometime. Or google's. Lots of folks
are hiring and I think you're overstating the outsourcing problem
just a wee bit there. You wouldn't be the first. Sure, there are a
lot of mediocre programmers who've lost their jobs to equally
mediocre (and cheaper) programmers overseas, but I'm not sure what
we're exactly arguing in defense of here now.
If I had any strength of character at all, I would pitch the
computer out the window, and go fly my little airplane. Maybe take
a short flight to Okahome, and go eat some lunch at one of the
local airports, or fly down to the Bahamas...
With aviation gas at $4.80 a gallon, I suspect it's a lack of
strength in your bank account more than a lack of strength of your
character that keeps you from flinging the computer out the window
and doing as you say. :-)
If, on the other hand, you're stinking rich then what are you doing
on this mailing list at all? You should be sipping mai tais on your
lanai in Hawaii and not wasting your time messing with this stuff! :-)
In my lifetime I have seen free time vanish from human existence,
except in France.
Give the new administration there a chance, will ya?
Anyway, great as the Mac has been, Apple has done a very poor job
in providing help to upgrade the ancient versions of software that
come with the OS.
You might try to come up with a justifiable business case for this.
If you can, I'll forward it to the powers that be. If not, then
you've answered your own lament.
So that even if they are not going to handle the upgrades from
Apache 1.3 on OSX, or Apache 2.0.52 on OSX Server, or openssl .96d,
or php 4.x to the current versions, they should have some really
good instructions on how to replace and upgrade the existing
outdated versions. Shamefully they don't do anything of the sort...
Maybe they don't WANT you to do that because to do so would have the
potential to create a mish-mash of software that makes AppleCare
rather unhappy when they try to diagnose some weird-ass problem
you're now having because, surprise surprise, you installed one of
those components with some completely unknown later version of the
same component that was never qualified with the OS as a whole.
Of course, if you're the type who is never likely to need AppleCare
then you're also the type who doesn't NEED instructions on how to do
this because you understand exactly what's involved in swapping
components in and out like this. You can't have it both ways.
Either you know what you're doing and can modify the heck out of your
system without instructions or you don't know what you're doing and
shouldn't be messing around under the cowling in the first place!
There's a term for folks in the latter category in aviation too: The
Deceased.
Perhaps if you are a home user with an iMac or a laptop you can get
by with Apache 1.3, (we're talking 4 or 5 years after Apache 2
became available) but certainly if you are shelling out a bunch of
money for OSX Server, Apple should be more forthcoming. Their
policy seems to be install it and forget. The user won't notice how
ancient this stuff is, and even if they do "We'll just tell them
that's not part of the 90 day support"...
Mac OS X Server comes with Apache 2. Look in /opt. It's in a
different location to avoid conflict because server users also HATE
when stuff is changed, they don't necessarily embrace it the way you
do. The OS qualification cycle for your average enterprise (and OS
X Server) customer is about 3 years. Change is not a good thing in
that market space.
To be honest, I do appreciate the fact that you can rant coherently
and are obviously willing to expend considerable time and energy
towards making your points, but you're also coming off sounding like
the aviation kit builder in my earlier analogy who also expects
building an aircraft to be really easy, take no more than 3 hours
with tools no more complicated than a hammer and a hacksaw, and
considers it almost an FAA conspiracy (with blame also shared by the
likes of Cessna and Piper) that learning to fly can't be done in an
hour with all those complex radio and airspace procedures being clear
evidence that aviation is being deliberately and gratuitously
complicated to a downright SHAMEFUL degree merely to make his life
difficult and detract from the enjoyment that so rightfully should be
his.
I'm also fairly sure that's not the impression you were trying or
wishing to leave us with, but it's something you definitely managed
to accomplish.
- Jordan
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