Checkbox for "Install Everything"

[Les]

> I am acutely aware that F7, like most distros, is free, and believe me 
> nobody appreciates the hard work that the Fedora people do more than 
> me.  Having said that, I have to wonder if the installer shouldn't be smart 
> enough to guard the user against these kinds of "either/or" conflicts... 
> and I have to further wonder if Linux will ever gain the mainstream 
> acceptance its adherents so devoutly wish for, if it is so easy to wedge an 
> installation by simply selecting too many things.
> 
> I can certainly understand that there will be certain things (drivers and 
> modules) that should not or cannot be run concurrently, and one would 
> expect whatever applications that need the drivers and modules to load them 
> and not any others.  I have trouble understanding why the very fact that 
> some conflicting thing is present on the disk is enough to cause a 
> conflict, even if it doesn't get loaded.  I suppose there could be some 
> modules with overloaded function names so that an application ends up 
> calling the wrong module function, and all I can say is "don't do that...".

Please remember that not all these free developers work on the same
timeline.  Thus packages may not be built with the latest libraries.
Also some packages just conflict in their support for other
applications, such as KDE and Gnome, although most such problems are
being ironed out, the issue is 
that software is a relatively new science, and linux is the newest of
the new.  Thus many bugs exist that are difficult to find and isolate
for repair, the interactions with 
drivers and hardware are difficult to always predict, and the effects of
sequences of commands on interfaces often puts their state machines into
states that were never forseen by their developers.  These problems have
to be found, isolated and fixed without impacting working software and
hardware.  It is not trivial.  Imagine a skyscraper with a bad beam on
the 6th floor.  How is that beam removed, replaced and the structure and
spaces patched without impacting other residents of the skyscraper,  or
effecting the total structure that is the skyscraper.  Bear in mind that
the new beam cannot violate either brittleness, stiffness, expansion or
contraction with the beam being replaced, nor be mismatched to the
remaining structure.
This is the process of bug fixes.  Now imagine that you are doing this
just for the challenge of doing it.  That is Fedora and Linux in
general.  Some folks get paid, but many don't .

Regards,
Les H
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20070520/33dea350/attachment-0001.htm>