On Fri, 27 May 2005, Axel Thimm wrote: > On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 09:38:56AM -0400, seth vidal wrote: > > On Fri, 2005-05-27 at 15:32 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote: > > > I'm sorry Seth, your choice of language has crossed a barrier. I hope > > > Karsten will still want to report on his broken alsa systems. > > > > > > On Fri, May 27, 2005 at 09:27:02AM -0400, seth vidal wrote: > > > > If it sounds like I'm pissed, I am. I'm tired of this horse-shit > > > > grab-ass of apt vs yum. If you want to use apt, more power to you, if > > > > you want tell people that yum 'munges' systems then you damn well better > > > > show me a bug report that backs it up. So far no one has shown me > > > > anything. So continue recommending apt, feel free, but shut the fuck up > > > > about yum munging things until you bring me a bug report. > > > > HAHA! > > > > You work in a physics department, right? > > > > I'm shocked you're not exposed to much worse on a daily basis. > > I fail to see the funny part. 4-letter words have no place in any > technical mailing lists as well as any physics department including > the one at Duke. To try to bring a little peace and sanity into the discussion, I think Seth's point is very clear and was made several times before he lost his temper. On a technical mailing list (like this one) the following kinds of threads are useful and constructive: * Bug reports * Feature requests * Tutorial/HOWTO requests from beginners or experts alike * More general discussion concerning the technical future of the particular tool(s) involved * A certain amount of good natured badinage and close-to-topic discussion. The following kinds of threads are useless and destructive: * Hate reports (unless associated with specific bugs or features, in which case they are in the first two categories above and ok) * Personal invective and ad-hominem attacks * Open advertisements for competing toolsets accompanied by unsupported hate reports * Off topic discussions of those competing toolsets or anything else. Here are some examples to make everything clear: "Yum sucks and breaks things." This is BAAAD. I mean seriously, what is the point of saying this? It doesn't help a single person on the list, either to avoid specific pitfalls or traps as a user or to fix yum's problems as a developer. It is in fact polemical, a backhanded form of ad-hominem attack on the developers, and the kind of discourse generally excluded from constructive dialogue in ALL fields. "Yum sucks and breaks things. Specifically, I used yum to install the shit-rpm package from Joe's repository with the following yum.conf, and although it `worked', the dependencies of shit-rpm broke the critical-rpm package and now my system won't boot." This is GOOOOD. Note that even though the comment is still heated, angry and by implication a wee bit ad-hominem regarding the developers who permitted all this to happen, it is USEFUL. Users can beware installing shit-rpm from Joe's repository in the short run, the developers can worry about how yum (which is VERY conservatively designed to protect even the ignorant from being ABLE to break things) managed to break a critical dependency with this PARTICULAR set of rpms and repositories. "Apt is a lot better than yum for managing rpms." This (true or not in your opinion) is BAAAD. This list could care less about people's unsupported opinion on pretty much anything, especially an opinion that the tool the list is dedicated to isn't as good as some other tool with its own lists and supporters and good and bad features (none of which are actually brought into the discussion). If you think apt is better and yum thereby pointless, USE apt, and join ITS lists, don't distract people on this list with your unsupported and thereby worthless (literally, not as a form of invective) opinion. "Apt is a lot better than yum for managing rpms. Apt has the following features that I really like and that yum is missing. Also, yum sometimes munges systems under the following very specific circumstances (with these particular rpms and repositories) that apt seems to handle." This is GOOOD. It isn't just offering an opinion, it is making specific critical comments that can be used by the yum developers to improve yum, and by yum users to avoid the circumstances where yum can break things until the developers have a chance to fix it. In fact, I recall discussions very much like this actually occuring on the list. See? It's really pretty simple, and has now been said a whole bunch of times. Seth finally just lost his temper instead of stating it patiently yet another time, because it IS (after all) an ad hominem attack and is openly polemical to make all sorts of extravagent claims of evil without any sort of specifics or useful accompanying information. This is naturally VERY FRUSTRATING to the developers, and it isn't terribly surprising that it eventually pisses them off royally and that they take steps to terminate the discussion thread unless/until it becomes constructive again. As a last remark, go to the linux kernel list, join up (and be prepared to be royally buried under a mountain of highly technical traffic:-). Then post a note that reads something like: "Linux sucks and inevitably screws up any computer it is installed on to where the hardware itself won't work even if you later reinstall something else. The kernel is clearly badly designed and in many places is obviously broken. Microsoft's operating systems are much better." Nothing more. No specifics concerning even a SINGLE COMPUTER where linux broke hardware (or how it happened), which kernel revision was involved, what distro was being used, how in particular the kernel's design is "bad" or "broken" or even how Microsoft's are better. See what kind of language THAT generates, quite possibly from Linus himself, who can be pretty abrupt in his language if he addresses something like this at all. Admittedly, MOST of the linux kernel list members (probably Linus included) are too busy to deal with polemical crap like that and would simply cut-and-paste you straight into their personal .procmailrc whereby you'd instantly become a non-person to them forever after. Consequently you'd only get a few hundred pieces of scathing invective (instead of several thousand), some of it doubtless pretty obscene, and the list manager would probably add to that a warning that constructive comment is welcome but that further polemics would equal list removal and blacklisting at the list server level. The yum list is actually very, very tolerant of any sort of CONSTRUCTIVE traffic, including highly critical constructive traffic. Just keep it on topic and support assertions with specific examples and avoid the "yum didn't work for my cousin and in fact broke his entire system but apt rocks" sort of anecdote, unless you can provide information on just what your cousin was doing at the time. Remember, rpm's are by their nature very complex beasts, and are built by hundreds if not thousands of people with very different programming styles. It is quite possible to build in more evil than yum can resolve into a chain of rpm dependencies, or even to create rpms that openly lie about things in such a way that later actions can quite possibly break them no matter what you do to avoid it, although yum does its best and tries hard to protect users with tell-me-twices and a refusal to function at all if an installation would require e.g. an rpm --force to work. Still, a user CAN use rpm --force by hand, a user CAN mix three or four internally inconsistent repositories together into a single yum.conf, a user CAN mess up their system enough that yum "breaks" things, if you want to blame such a breakage on the tool rather than the misuse of several tools and incompatible repositories by an ignorant user. Even here, the list itself exists to support such a user on the road to recovery and a more sane usage, and any constructive suggestions on how to make yum even MORE robust and hence prevent future occurences (if possible) would doubtless be entirely welcome. rgb -- Robert G. Brown http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/ Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone: 1-919-660-2567 Fax: 919-660-2525 email:rgb@xxxxxxxxxxxx
