Re: The Long Goodbye
Eric S. Raymond wrote:
I can tell you the library in question was libcom_err, and I think I
deleted it when removing e2fsprogs-libs to get around a file conflict.
But with rpm not working I couldn't reinstall the library. Boot failed,
ssh/sshd failed -- I had to kluge with netcat and tar just to back up
my files. It was horrible.
Alas, I no longer have the logs, as I lost them during installation.
I don't recall what the file was, but the conflict was completely
avoidable and would never have occurred if the repo and RPMs had been
in a sane state.
Why does "booted from the install media in recovery mode" not feature in
this anywhere? Then you could have wgetted
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/...
from inside the recovery boot and installed it after a chroot or with
--root= on rpm.
Yesterday I rendered this laptop unbootable by broken code I added to
the iwlwifi driver sources: I was back up in five minutes thanks to the
recovery boot, deleting the driver and rebooting into the kernel so I
could fix it and go on.
That experience, like each time I use the recovery boot, left me feeling
grateful for the feature and empowered, that even with a half trashed
system I can force it back to life. Whereas without it, you were left
feeling very different.
To no visible result. You had the developers, the first-mover
advantage, and the corporate backing; you lacked the vision and the
will to follow through. Ubuntu shows what could have been done -- but
if you guys had executed correctly, Ubuntu's market- and mindshare
would be at best statistical noise (if it existed at all).
...
its root. They might get it solved in time to meet the 64-bit
deadline Rob Landley and I have seen coming, but Fedora clearly will
not. So much for Fedora.
Rob sent me a link to your thesis some weeks ago, but as I told him then
it seems completely bogus to me. Some geeky metric like the sizeof(int)
going to control whether the man in the street switches OS or not.
Crushing Ubuntu isn't what the other OSes are about. If you look at it
from, say, a Gnome or kernel perspective where RHAT are active, is it a
loser globally for RHAT if Gnome or the kernel are gaining in popularity
in another distro? So it is a lot more nuanced, Fedora is not a
commercial entity where there is per-user revenue and retarding the
competition advances yourself. While there are hundreds of thousands of
users it has a lot of meaning, especially seen as a Fedora / RHEL /
CentOS axis where the OS semantics are all compatible. I paid to get my
*RH*CE, a Canonical or Linspire version won't do.
-Andy