linux = impossible? (no offense meant!)

[Byron Desnoyers Winmill]

On Sat, Nov 08, 2003 at 12:58:37PM -0500, David J Patrick wrote:
> Well clearly you have never seen a decent package manager in action.

It doesn't matter if the best package manager in the world is easier to
use than Windows installation programs.  It simply won't fly if it
doesn't fit people perceptions of how things should be done.  These
days, people think you obtain a piece of software (either in a store or
by downloading it) and run an installer.  That will never work under
Linux because of dependencies.

> Dependencies area fact of linux life, allowing programmers to "stand 
> on the shoulders of giants".

I won't argue with the bit about giants: gtk+, motif, and qt are pretty
big libraries after all.  ;-)  I think that I have all of them
installed too!

> Dependency hell, however is slowly fading to a dim memory.

Dependency hell won't fade away until developers decide to toss away
this notion that two, three, four, etc. levels of dependencies are
acceptable.  If anything, the situation is getting worse ... and I
really wish that they would go back to static linking.  (How many
libraries are used by one or two applications per system?)

> Some users (drivers) will only ever do things with a GUI (full service 
> station).

Baloney.  A GUI need be no more or no less powerful than the command
line.  If a difference does exist in functionality (and I certainly
think there is), it is only because most GUIs were designed with less
functionality to make them easier to use.  Similarly, you can design
character based environments which are easier to use than GUIs.  (The
best examples are probably library catalogues, where extensive
usability studies were done in the past.  After seeing many GUI and
web based implementations, I doubt that the same is being done today.)

Byron.
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