[CentOS-devel] rhwas 5 work?

[R P Herrold]

On Sat, 29 Mar 2008, Les Mikesell wrote:

> R P Herrold wrote:
>>  This week, in another part of FOSS, Fedora finds itself in 
>> a trap, fueled in part by 'what if' extreme remarks by some 
>> who post here, to be 'more friendly' to users who will not 
>> learn the Unix ways of PATH.

> Do you think a unix-like OS distribution is only viable if 
> it propagates the flavor wars with incompatible differences 
> with other distributions?

Yes under the principle of not breaking reasonable 
expectation (see: the first Gancarz essay 'The UNIX 
Philosophy' for a good reprise of it).

Not that I concur in the combustible qualification later in 
that sentence.

We are in the present place we are and the fragmentation wars 
are long over; the ATT which attacked Berkeley is also long 
gone and unmourned.  No tears can wash out the ink the moving 
finger has left.  The landscape shaped by how we got here are 
in no way 'incompatible' to a user in the tool builders 
culture of 'nix; BSD and SysV live in the 'ps' and 'find' I 
rely upon every day, and each brings a strength to those who 
live in the shell.

Two lines of code permit a person ignorant of PATH changes to 
reach their ill-advised desire; altering the operating system, 
so that the minimal tools needed for recovery from the single 
'/' partition would be a massive and pervasive changed, and a 
serious loss.  It is a fool's errand to do so; it has proved a 
debating society's pigsty to wallow in.

Discarding culture, ignoring history, and faddishly taking 
away strengths to 'gain share' is the way of vendors and those 
with an agenda to grind; and not the way of those who live in 
the Unix culture who need to work in a long lived stable 
environment.

- Russ herrold