I did a long-overdue dist-upgrade recently. Most packages were upgraded
without much evident fuss, change, or improvemnt.
I did, however, notice some serious deterioration with some of the most used
packeage. E.g
galeon. There was this neat trick where you could right-click a single
entry in the history to delete it. Think about it: it's useful. That's
gone. You can now wipe the entire history, or non at all.
xterm: the latest unstable version has gone back a couple of years to 8
colours rather than 16. and worse than that, in conjunction with zsh,
will not reproduce the last argumant of the previous command with
alt-period. (Repeated alt-periods would cycle back through the history
and
present the last arsg. Very useful, and not available, except if you go
back to the stable version.
Xsane (+ gimp): The old xscanimage interface was the best in the
Universe. Preview, click 180 degrees if neeeded, change brightness and
contrast on the previewed image before scanning. Save settings for
subsequent scans from a similar batch of photos or pages. The current
unstable version has regressed about 4 years to the point of
amateurishness. Honestly, I haven't seen a Windows or mac scananer
interface as quick or useful as xsane WAS.
Is there a point at which software gets to be 'As good as it gets? Does the
development change hands and the new face needs to put his own unnneeded
stamp on the package? How can one guard against false development? Should I
save a 2003 Woody CD set and stay in that year from now on?
I can't help feeling the Golden Age has passed.
Nick
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
