"David A. Desrosiers" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>Jon Hamkins writes:
> Ok, noted, I'll add the FAQ to the website.
Thanks, much appreciated. I think this will help many users and
potential users.
>> But still no 3.5.
>
> 3.5 of what?
Sorry for not being clear. There is no question 3.5 in the FAQ of the
v1.1 release of plucker. Mike referred to updating question 3.5 to say
that python is broken not only in Red Hat 7.0, but also in 7.1.
>> But with that attitude, you're ending up not supporting the most used
>> linux distribution out there, and costing a great application a lot of
>> visibility.
>
> This is your opinion, not fact, unfortunately.
Well, yes, it is my opinion that plucker is a great application, and
that not supporting it on the most used linux distribution limits
visibility.
If you are quibbling with my claim that Red Hat is the most popular
distribution, I would say that, you are correct that there is no
incontrovertible proof that this is so. However, the statement is not
an opinion of the same type as "blue is the best color". There is
plenty of evidence to support the proposition.
Among noncommercial distributions, perhaps the most popular ones are
Debian and the roll-your-own. In the early days, I would typically
start with a RH install, and then compile my own kernel and add things
which were necessary to get things (sound, X, etc.) working on my
particular hardware. Statistics are very hard to come by for these
distributions, but with the tremendous growth of linux in the last few
years, the newbie-izing of linux most likely means that the commercial
distributions are being installed at a faster clip than the
noncommercial. For example, acording to a recent Netcraft web server
survey, 72% of linux-based Web sites are running Red Hat.
Among commercial distributions, Red Hat outsold its nearest competitor
more than 2 to 1 in February 2000, according to PC Data. In August
2000, IDC reported that Red Hat is outselling its next five competitors
combined, and accounted for 48% of all sales. Granted, this isn't a
direct measure of linux usage because even the commercial distributions
can be downloaded for free and the CD's can be shared and copied in
disproportionate amounts after sale, but there has never been any thesis
put forth that one commercial distribution would propagate in this
fashion in a way fundamentally different from any other commercial
distribution. A logical conclusion is that, to a first order
approximation, Red Hat is used at least twice as much as any other
commercial distribution.
The anecdotal evidence also points to Red Hat being the most popular.
Hardware vendors (IBM, Dell, etc.) are mostly lining up with Red Hat,
not noncommercial distributions. And where I work, many people are
using Red Hat, a few use Mandrake, and a few use Debian. No, I'm not
claiming anything scientific here.
More important that all of the above, even if someone can come along and
show that all of this is wrong because, say, Debian has more users than
Red Hat, that doesn't imply that Red Hat is not also popular. It is.
Therefore, plucker would get more positive publicity if plucker worked
on Red Hat. That was my main point, and I don't see anything
particularly controversial about it.
> Ok, so great, what are you doing to help us?
This is the oldie but goodie defensive stand-by response of an open
source programmer who is feeling criticized by some nobody such as
myself complaining about their open source software. I understand the
sentiment, but often, this kind of response can turn off people who do
actually want to help.
But, ignoring David's sarcasm, I will try to answer the question
honestly. Primarily, what I have done to try to help you is to bring
the plucker Red Hat compatibility issue to the table by reporting it six
months ago to the plucker developer list. As I don't know python, I
couldn't look into the problem too deeply myself, but I did look at the
code anyway and humbly offered that perhaps Url.py contained the code
that was not working correctly on with Red Hat 7.0. In the last six
months, there really has been no followup to the suggestion that the
plucker code could be modified to fix the problem. Plucker subsequently
went merrily though to 1.0 release without much discussion of this
problem, and on to 1.1 as well. The suggestions to Red Hat users have
been to check Red Hat for a python update (none was forthcoming-- as far
as I know, there has been no reported problems with python), to
downgrade python to the version running in Red Hat 6.2, and later, to
upgrade python to the 2.0 release. All the while, Mike referred to the
Red Hat systems as broken (which may be true for all I know, but there
is no evidence of it), without considering the possibility that plucker
may be broken. I don't know if it is, but we should all be open to the
possibility. Mike clearly isn't, which was my complaint.
----Jon
