ubuntu bulletproof x

[Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay]

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Douglas McClendon wrote:

> And perhaps, if fedora actually respected ubuntu, and kept up with their
> advances, rather than exclusively playing catch up, they wouldn't be
> having their asses handed to them.

I sense something amiss here when you say "respect". The fact remains
that there are almost always more than one way to resolve a particular
problem and according what I interpret of ajax's mail the way of
choosing .inf files is kind of tricky. At a very broad level there would
be considerable overlap in terms of work, innovation being pushed by
various distributions into the upstream. I believe that reading the
infrequent mails on this from Max, Rahul et al would be self explanatory.

Let me share a personal experience here - for the better part of the
first 3 years of using Linux (and constantly shifting between newer
releases from Red Hat, Mandrake and SuSE) I was stuck with a X that
refused to behave as expected all because of a SiS card. Would an .inf
file reading "Bulletproof" idea helped then ? If you had asked me then
I'd have mostly agreed. Now, I don't think so. There are multiple
reasons why, but barring the technical ones which ajax is qualified to
comment on, the reason I see is that we would send a strong signal to
outside ODMs that it is proper not to do code push for Linux and
software engineers on Linux can reverse engineer the black box. That is
what I perceive as a very slippery slope. It starts off from X (and
monitor configuration) which impacts the end user - but it has the
potential to reacher deeper invasive depths at various levels where
drivers and driver CDs for Windows just solve the problem while Linux
struggles. *That* is something we really don't want.

> Yes, I know redhat has learned well from microsoft, that the way to be
> successful is to let others do the expensive trailblazing, and then only
> copy the trails that led to success, rather than those that led to
> failure.  I have no problem with that attitude, I think it is
> intelligent.  But please, this is just a mailinglist where people
> routinely talk about blowing goats.  So don't tell me to STFU like the
> rest of the people on this list can't handle the signal/noise ratio.

I did not read it as people asking you to STFU. I'd rather say it was
more of a request to step back and reasonably assess the choice. More
often than not these days I see this choice between being pragmatic
(let's just get this darn thing to work and shunt aside some of the
niggling worries related to licenses and the like) and being dogmatic
(let's not forget that there is only way to solve the issue and that is
by collaborating with upstream in a transparent manner). I'd have to say
that over the years I have been using Linux, I am happy to see that
being dogmatic does help.


- --

You see things; and you say 'Why?';
But I dream things that never were;
and I say 'Why not?' - George Bernard Shaw
www.linkedin.com/in/sankarshan


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