> On Fri, Jan 11, 2002 at 07:23:47AM -0600, Brent Clements wrote: > > Why doesn't RH stay with the normal way of doing things with unix and not > > try to change? > > > > I guess I'm just ranting...thank you for listening. :-) There is no doubt that changing things creates a large amount of heartache and pain; when I changed my home system from 7.0 to 7.2 I went through much of the same things just changing from Red Hat to Red Hat! Believe me, the old Red Hat way is *deeply* ingrained in me! "Why?" is a fair question though, and deserves a good answer. Trying to increase the adoption of Linux (for both religious and business reasons) regularly shows limitations of the "Unix way". The Unix print system, for example, was designed 25 years ago and hasn't really changed much. It's sorely lacking in configurability and flexibility (relying on custom scripts for everything) which really shows up when you try and put together print systems that the "average" user can configure. Items like color and paper_type are completely left out, and the system has basically no idea what a "driver" is. We, and the rest of the Linux community, have addressed these types of problems before. RPM, gnome, and initrd's are certainly not the "unix" way of doing things. They may seem familiar to you now, but they all created problems. Our only other choice is stagnation. Given Linus's stated goal of "total world domination", you can see that isn't an option! We'll continue to try to evolve Red Hat to be more user friendly, hopefully in a way that's compatible with our Unix roots. None of this is to say that our current print configuration is perfect (it may or may not be; I've never looked at it enough to have an educated opinion), and we'll happily listen to comments about how we can change things for the better. Erik ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | "Distracting? I'm inspiring" | | - Sally Bowles in Cabaret |
