Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>>> The best part is when you say "make configure", and it says 
>>>> "Unrecognised arch 'i586/SuSE 10.3'". And you're like "WTF? Now what do 
>>>> I do??"
>>>   Yes, it's clearly a problem with *linux* when some software you are
>>> trying to install is broken.
> 
>> Right. And the fact that the design of Unix is overly complex and 
>> incorporates several decades of backwards compatibility is unrelated? ;-)
> 
>   It's not like Windows is any better in that regard.

Actually, much of the *design* of Windows was pretty clean. It's the 
implementation and backwards compatibility of stuff that's ugly. (To a 
large extent, a lot of the backwards-compatibility uncleanness is for 
supporting people who didn't actually follow the APIs, and did stuff 
like wrote .ini files instead of using the ini system calls, and 
hard-coded paths instead of asking the OS where files should go, and so on.)

The original UNIX *design* was clean too, but the accumulation of 
historical file names is nasty. The other ugliness, IMO, is the number 
of places where an API is not provided but instead it's a file format, 
or a library, or something like that. Stuff like opening a directory as 
a file to read the directory (cured when BSD 4 forced a directory format 
changed), reading /etc/passwd and parsing it to get information (cured 
when shadow password files became common), etc.

>   At least Apple dares to break backwards compatibility with ancient
> software and architectures. It hasn't slowed them down much.

Yep.

>   Unix was never designed for people who don't know nor want to know
> anything about computers. It was designed for sysadmins and the like.

Well, yeah, I suppose that's true too. :-)  Good point.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

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