> "I don't know of anybody who's using it yet."
>
> I'm using it.  In a VM.  So there's one. ;)

There's always one. ;-)

No, seriously. I'm not saying nobody on Earth is using it. I'm sure 
people are. I just said that not /many/ people are using it yet. I 
imagine that will gradually change over time.

> The reason one asks for help is when something is beyond one's skill
> level.

Sure.

> When I'm giving technical interviews, you might recall, I ask questions I
> know the candidate doesn't stand a chance of asking.  The reason I do
> this is to find out how they learn beyond their current skill.

That's kind of evil. I'm not sure how somebody sitting in an interview 
chair is supposed to solve a problem right there on the spot. I mean, 
it's not like they can go away and look stuff up...

> You seem to think there's no point in asking questions to learn more.
> That's troubling.  You *have* the ability to learn, and you seek out
> information when it suits you.  But at the same time, you declare
> something as "impossible"

If I wanted to know how to live forever, I wouldn't bother posting a 
question in an online forum. You know why? Because... it's... 
impossible. It's not that I don't know how, it's that IT CANNOT BE DONE.

Now with software we're dealing with somewhat less absolute quantities. 
I gather that if you read Linux From Scratch, it actually directs you to 
where you can download the source code for an entire Linux/GNU system 
and compile just the parts you want from source. YOU do the dependency 
management by hand, and in theory you can alter the source code to 
remove dependencies you don't want. So hypothetically it's *possible* to 
work around any given distro's poor dependency management. Does that 
mean I actually want to go to such extremes? Not really, no.

> (remember the discussion we had a couple years
> ago about debugging a kernel?  You uncategorically declared it was
> impossible to do so, and I told you that I had actually *done* so myself,
> but you still refused to believe it was possible to use a kernel debugger
> to get anything useful out of a crash).

I still don't get how you can take megabytes of unformatted raw binary 
and glean anything remotely useful from it, but hey. Apparently there's 
some kind of black magic that makes this possible...

> You need to revise your view on that kind of thing and admit that you
> don't know *everything*, but that there are people who know *more* than
> you do and that you could *learn* from them.

The greatest knowledge is in knowing that you know nothing.

On the other hand, if you punch a brick wall with your fist, it hurts. A 
lot! Now do you assume you're just doing it wrong, and go ask an online 
forum how to do it "right"? Or do you just stop punching walls? I know 
which one I'd go for... I guess that makes me ignorant then.

>> My limited experience is that when you ask for help, you get no reply.
>> Or you get a few replies from people who don't really know how to help
>> you, but they try to offer you some kind of useful information anyway.
>
> Your experience is limited; you need to gain more experience.

If you try something, and it doesn't work, you can keep trying it over 
and over again, or you can try something else. Which option is the most 
rational?

(I guess it's a question of degree, of course. If you give up at the 
first try, you'd never get anywhere. Then again, if you keep doing 
something that clearly doesn't work, you're also not going to get 
anywhere...)

>> What's to understand? Dependencies are tracked at a fairly coarse level.
>> It is what it is. Just live with it...
>
> So, there's absolutely nothing more you can learn about dependency
> tracking in Linux?

Package managers track package dependencies. Packaging teams write those 
dependencies. Sometimes their structure is a little coarse. What more is 
there to learn?

> Some dependencies are very coarse, yes.  Some are not.  Your assumption,
> based on a high level understanding, is incomplete - and you certainly
> *could* ask for more information about it and possibly even contribute to
> making it better.

IME, although the open source development model means that theoretically 
anyone can contribute to improving the product, in practise this doesn't 
work. It's extremely rare for submitting a bug report to actually result 
in a fix. [That's assuming the problem is even strictly speaking a "bug" 
and not merely a "hey, maybe if the system looked more like THIS it 
might be better".] Actually contributing code is usually a practical 
impossibility, for various reasons.

I'm sure somebody somewhere is committing code. But for most of us, it's 
just not an option.

> Or at least understand it better, instead of parroting an explanation
> that the MS-fanbois just love.

The irony is, I used to be the biggest Microsoft hater ever. I was used 
to using AmigaOS, an operating system which ACTUALLY WORKS PROPERLY. 
Compared to that, everything to come out of Redmond seemed like the 
biggest pile of junk ever. And then along comes Linux. It's based on 
tried and tested technology. It has powerful tools. It has uptimes 
measured in decades. It's faster and more efficient. It sounded so exciting!

Of course, initially Linux was a total PITA to set up and actually use. 
You needed to know all sorts of exotic technical details about your PC 
in order to get it to install. Making X11 work was basically a hopeless 
task.

Obviously things have improved considerably since then. I still remember 
when KNOPPIX first appeared. An entire OS that you can just boot off a 
CD, without configuring anything, and it just WORKS. Most of the time. 
OK, sometimes. Back in the day, that was a stunning achievement. These 
days *every* distro has a live CD. But once upon a time, it was really 
impressive to be able to modify a distro to the point where it can be 
run from a read-only filesystem small enough to fit on one CD.

(KNOPPIX itself has since gone all minimal. But there are lots of other 
live CDs available now...)

I make a point of always having a few Linux live CDs around. You never 
know when you're going to need to mount a Linux-formatted filesystem, or 
quickly format a disk without installing an entire OS first, take a raw 
drive image of something, or whatever.

Over time, however, I came to realise that Linux doesn't actually seem 
to be much more efficient than Windows. That used to be one of the big 
things people talked about: you can run Linux on a 283 with 16MB RAM, 
and it WORKS, and it WORK WELL. Try doing that with Windows! But you 
know what? It's a long time since I've seen a distro that can still do that.

There was a time when Windows used to crash constantly, PCs were barely 
powerful enough to run it, configuring it was tedious and complicated, 
applications would never uninstall cleanly and often wouldn't install 
cleanly in the first place... and basically the entire thing just 
sucked. No wonder so many people hated it!

Over time, Windows has gradually become less sucky. And I haven't used 
an Amiga for a very long time, so I no longer have any truly great 
software to compare it to. Linux has improved dramatically as well, of 
course... The latest Ubuntu basically asks you for a username and 
password, and then just *installs* itself. Next time the PC reboots, you 
have a fully-functional Ubuntu install. It doesn't /get/ much simpler 
than that. (Although I dread to think what happens when it goes wrong...)

Essentially, things have evolved to the point where you can compare 
Windows and Linux, and see that each of them actually have merits 
compared to the other. And the point we're currently arguing about is 
one of them. On Windows, you just *install* stuff, and it works. Under 
Linux, you try to install stuff, and mostly it just works... except when 
it doesn't. And then all hell breaks lose.

I'm not saying the entire Linux system sucks. I'm saying one specific 
aspect of it is annoyingly difficult. And yet, everybody is yelling at 
me like I'm some noob who installed Linux, tried it for ten minutes, and 
couldn't figure out what the A: drive is called now so I gave it. It's 
not LIKE that AT ALL. And it irritates me when people tell me I don't 
know what I'm talking about...

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