[techtalk] Re: Linux-Mandrake

James Sutherland jas88 at cam.ac.uk
Fri May 25 15:29:59 EST 2001


On Fri, 25 May 2001, Scott wrote:

> At 07:09 PM 5/24/2001 +0100, James Sutherland wrote:
> >8.0, updated a few days ago. I'm not blaming Mandrake for breaking Perl in
> >an update - Debian managed to break sendmail not too long ago, as Michelle
> >found; every distro breaks things occasionally. What I *AM* ditching
> >Mandrake for is replacing things like "vi" and "gcc" with stupid Perl
> >scripts which attempt to colour in the output, and break things in the
> >process!
> >
> >Nicer, I'll agree, but I'm not sure I can ever forgive them those stupid
> >Perl wrappers round everything... When I run "gcc", I want to be running
> >the GNU C Compiler, not some sort of colouring-in-script wrapped round it!
>
> Don't you think Mandrake has done some wonder's for the desktop
> though?  While I feel like I am outgrowing it right now and want the
> comfort of the command line more than a wizard--there are benefits of
> setting things up the way they did. Heck, friends who would never
> consider Linux have changed their minds after using Mandrake.

Yep - it's a great newbie desktop distro. Things like those colouring-in
wrapper scripts just annoy me, though: they don't add *ANY* extra
functionality, and do add an extra layer of complexity to go wrong. (I've
seen the wrapper script core-dump; simply piping the output through cat
disables this "feature", and allows gcc to work again.)

I'm all in favour of simplifying and explaining things to make the system
more user-friendly - but colouring in the error messages isn't
user-friendly, it's just silly. Why do it?!?


James.





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