>> Wait - YaST has documentation?
>
> Um, yes.  man yast for starters.

Surely that just tells you the command name and what switches it has?

>>> OSS is big about community.
>>
>> That sounds very nice and all, but if I'm trying to quickly set
>> something up, I don't really want to have to go onto the Internet and
>> beg for help, and then spend a week or two hoping that somebody
>> knowledgeable will just happen across my message and actually take the
>> time to give me a helpful response. I want to read a manual that tells
>> me how to do this RIGHT NOW.
>
> Right, you'd rather struggle with it for weeks and weeks and then bitch
> about how difficult it is to do anything.
>
> Instead of asking a question and getting an answer within a couple of
> days so you can actually use it.

You're assuming that I'm just doing it wrong, and not that it's actually 
a poorly designed system.

>>> I guess I imagined all those Technet articles that have the warning I
>>> sited earlier about how editing the registry can screw your system up.
>>> That must be it, because of course Microsoft would *never* recommend
>>> you do something that might bork your system.
>>
>> The warning is partly there because if you're a clueless user who
>> doesn't know how to work a computer properly, it's very easy to do a
>> hell of a lot of damage using a registry editor. Personally, I have
>> almost never borked my system by editing the registry. The only time
>> it's happened is when I started deleting stuff at random in a desperate
>> attempt to make something work. If you follow the instructions, it works
>> fine.
>
> So, modifying it is dangerous.  Or not.  The warnings don't exist.  Or
> they do.
>
> Gotcha.

FFS... Inexpert registry editing can screw up your system. Just like 
going into a random system folder and deleting files can screw up your 
system. If you're knowledgeable enough to not do things like that, then 
it's perfectly safe to edit the registry. (And yes, the documentation 
has warnings all over the place in case some random user types some 
stuff into Google and ends up on a technical information page telling 
you how to edit registry keys.)

>> My point remains: It's very uncommon to /need/ to touch the registry in
>> the first place. Whereas under Unix, the text configuration files are
>> the first port of call, not the last. That's just the difference in
>> design mentality.
>
> Unless you use YaST, webmin, or one of a myriad of other Linux
> configuration tools.

In my experience:

1. The user-friendly front-ends tend to be quite fragile. If something 
breaks, you still need to go edit the underlying text file by hand.

2. The user-friendly tools are completely different for every distro. If 
you know how to edit the Apache configuration files, you can configure 
Apache on any system. If you only know how to do it with YaST, you're 
going to have a heck of a lot of trouble setting up Apache on Debian.

Whether different distros should be considered "different products" is 
an open question, of course. But lots of people seem to think that you 
can "know Linux", and that means you can work any variant of Linux.

>>> Obviously you don't know many Linux users.  I know at least 5,000, and
>>> many of them not only love and use the GUI, but tend to have religious
>>> wars over which GUI is better.
>>
>> And yet, the vast majority of all Linux software is strictly CLI-only,
>> and developers always seem to expect somebody /else/ to build the pretty
>> front-end for it.
>
> That's just incorrect.  But since you believe it is, it must be true,
> regardless of evidence to the contrary.

I haven't seen much "evidence to the contrary". The entire Unix 
philosophy seems to revolve around doing everything from the command 
line. That's why they have powerful shells (plural), sophisticated text 
processing tools, and so forth. From what I've experienced, all the 
flashy new GUI tools are just thin skins over an OS which essentially 
hasn't changed since the days when "TTY" was a commonly-used acronym.

>> JET is no match for an enterprise database engine, sure. But it's more
>> transactional than a flat file.
>>
>> Also, I'm not completely sure that the registry is actually JET. It
>> might be, but I didn't think it was. For one thing, registry files grow
>> as needed, but never shrink. I don't think JET has that limitation.
>
> FFS, *Active Directory* is (was) JET.  Maybe they moved to something else
> now, but I know from personal discussions with AD architects at Microsoft
> that it is/was JET.
>
> JET has been MS' solution for simple database storage for a number of
> years, possibly decades.

Wikipedia concurs that AD is definitely Jet. (Jet Blue, in fact. MS 
Access is Jet Red.) I can find no mention of Jet on the registry page. 
(Which may just indicate that the page is incomplete.)

At any rate, I didn't say that the registry *is not* Jet. I said I don't 
*think* it's Jet. I explicitly said I'm not 100% sure on this point. I 
think it pre-dates Jet, but I might be mistaken.

>> Admitting you're wrong is one thing. But they did something illegal;
>> where is the *financial* pain for that?
>
> Obviously you missed the fact that they paid fines to the EC for their
> illegal activities.

Yes, I completely missed that part. Tell me, did these fines amount to 
more than 0.001% of their annual profits?

> And they had to reengineer some things

Right. That actually costs money. OOC, what did they have to change?

Post a reply to this message