On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:20:57 +0100, Invisible wrote:

>>> Wait - YaST has documentation?
>>
>> Um, yes.  man yast for starters.
> 
> Surely that just tells you the command name and what switches it has?

TRY IT.

That *is* in fact what documentation is, though, so yes - it has 
documentation, and it's included in the man page.

>> 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'm assuming you can be taught.  You seem to have an aptitude for 
learning, but you also seem to think that if you believe something is 
impossible, then it damned well is impossible - and nothing anyone says 
is going to change your mind.

>>> 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.

My experience with the supposed 'fragility' of those tools is different. 
<shrug>  Maybe 10 years ago it was, but not today.

> 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.

And if you learn how to do it with the config files, then you're good for 
most crossplatform applications.  So you have to decide - do you want to 
learn it on a specific distro, or do you want to generalise?

Or do you want to accept that there are different tools, and which one 
you use depends on what you know - and take the time to actually learn 
the tools if you switch from Fedora to openSUSE?

> 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.

Which means you work with the raw config files.

Or you use Webmin, which actually *does* (a) work the same regardless of 
distribution, and (b) can manage the services on multiple distributions.

I mean really - I used it to manage configuration on SunOS, exactly the 
same way I used it on RedHat and SUSE.

But of course, you want to believe that doing so is impossible, so I 
must've imagined it, right?

>>>> 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.

If you haven't seen much evidence to the contrary, you haven't been 
looking.  Really, you haven't.  I talk to Linux developers fairly 
regularly, and to application developers on occasion who work on OSS 
applications for Linux.  Banshee isn't just a front-end to CLI tools.  
Neither is F-Spot.  Neither is Photivo.  Neither is OpenOffice.  Neither 
is [...] - the list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and ON.

>>> 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.

It may well pre-date JET, or it might've been migrated.

>>> 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?

As I recall, it was seen as an appropriate punishment.

>> And they had to reengineer some things
> 
> Right. That actually costs money. OOC, what did they have to change?

As I recall, they have a specific release of Windows for the EU that 
allows IE to be removed (completely, IIRC).

Jim

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