[CentOS] discussioning how software gets obsolete in general [was Re: Does anyone use tcp wrappers (hosts.allow/hosts.deny) anymore?]

[Fred Smith]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 05:42:43PM -0400, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> Matthew Miller wrote:
> > On Thu, Mar 20, 2014 at 05:18:42PM -0400, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> >> On the other hand, what justifiable reason was there for the massively
> >> increased complexity of grub2?
> >
> > Probably none, but legacy grub didn't have support for booting on UEFI
> > platforms, and no one wanted to add that support, let alone maintain it.
> >
> Yeah, and a lot of us are unfriendly to UEFI....
> 
> > In recent Fedora, I added rudimentary support for extlinux as a bootloader
> > when you want to avoid the grub2 complexity. (This is a great example,
> > though, of something that may not trickle down from Fedora, unless someone
> > wants to step up to make the feature more robust.)
> >
> >> And why do all configuration files suddenly
> >> *desperately* need to be xml?
> >
> > If only the grub2 config files were xml! Instead, they're shell scripts
> > which generate shell scripts which generate the actual configuration.
> 
> *gag* That's the impression I got from my netbook (Ubuntu netbook remix).
> 
> I get *real* tired of people who are clever, and bit themselves in the
> back doing it. I'm a firm believer in elegance... and simplicity is
> usually elegant.

I've read that Brian Kernighan said something like this, once upon 
a time:

"Debugging code is at least twice as hard as writing it. Therefore,
if you write code a cleverly as you possibly can, you are then, by
definition, not smart enough to be able to debug it."

Seems like that would apply to a pile of kludges as described above.

-- 
---- Fred Smith -- fredex at fcshome.stoneham.ma.us -----------------------------
                         God made him who had no sin
                      to be sin for us, so that in him
                 we might become the righteousness of God."
--------------------------- Corinthians 5:21 ---------------------------------