On Aug 24, 2004, Havoc Pennington <hp@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Though I don't agree with the general sentiment here - our job ("our" is
> intended broadly, including upstream and non Red Hat developers) is to
> make sound technical decisions, not throw a bunch of possibly-working
> crap on a disk.
Sound technical decisions will hardly make everybody happy. Sure, you
can optimize for a wide selection of uses, but you can't optimize it
for everybody. Heck, even a single person may very well have
different hosts for which requirements vary wildly. If you think you
can make everybody happy, you're bound to fail.
That's the nice thing about choice: people can then optimize their
systems to suit *their* needs as well as possible, without having to
make trade offs because others have different requirements.
Sometimes you can introduce a few options into a single base framework
that will make it good enough for pretty much everybody. Other times,
you'll have to introduce significantly different frameworks to enable
the system to behave optimally for different uses.
Too much choice can be bad, but concluding from this that choice is
bad in general, and then proceed to always take it away, is far worse.
--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
