[techtalk] Re: rpms r not-so-good and Linux-Mandrake

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Fri, May 25, 2001 at 10:04:28PM -0700 or thereabouts, Stacy Brock wrote:
> > Methinks there is a significant amount of
> > Debian snobbishness floating around, not too unlike
> > the Gnome vs. KDE desktop wars.  Why a distro has to
> > be un-user friendly to be cool is beyond me, and that
> > certainly is Debian's reputation.
> 
> Oooh, I just have to jump into the thread on this one.
> ;) Please send comments to me, or post them to issues,
> as I'm skirting the Line of OT-ness.

issues is more for women and IT/Linux/etc, so I'm sticking
to techtalk.
 
> I'm a relative Linux newbie (I've been running Linux
> solely on my main box for about 6 months now). I also
> use Debian.
> 
> Guess what? Even for this newbie, the install was NOT as
> difficult as everyone makes it out to be. The Ncurses
> GUI installer may not have the pretty penguin pictures
> that Mandrake 7 and 8 has, but it works. Since Debian's
> installer now uses "make menuconfig" instead of "make
> config"...setup is fairly straightforward.

What other OSes had you had experience of, though? Had
you installed those before? Are you happy adding stuff to
your box? There's a lot of people for whom "I got more
memory" means "and now I have to take it down to the shop
and pay someone to put it in for me". If you know that
your mouse is a USB mouse, then you're one ahead already :) 

I am very used to RH and only a little used to Debian, and
I had less trouble than I expected installing, but then,
I read the docs, and I knew what most of the packages were.
Also, I had heard so much about "dselect hell" that I was
prepared for a long haul. 
 
> I've heard a saying among Debian users that goes like
> this: "If you can't install it [Debian], you shouldn't
> be using it." If you call that snobbishness, I can't
> help you. 

I do find the statement "if you can't install foo, you
shouldn't use it" faintly snobbish, I must admit. I am
not stupid and I do read docs. When there are none, I
write the things. But then, I have been -using- Linux 
for a very long time: my husband was the one who installed
it originally. Should I have avoided it until I was able
to install it? I only learned the things I needed to know
to install by using the thing in the first place. 

> However, I think that the saying really means
> this: "If you aren't patient enough to RTFM, you
> shouldn't be using it [Debian]."
> And I think that applies to Linux as a whole as well. :)

I have to throw in a comment that is not original to me
here. It comes from Jon Lasser's "Think Unix" book, which I
heartily recommend to anyone. It's short but very sweet. 
He begins by telling people how to get the most out of
man pages and other sources of documentation, which is a
sensible approach. His exercises at the back of each chapter
had me realising how much I did or didn't know and what I
had been missing.

The footnote for a particular example:

   Actually I was rather disturbed to find that the Linux man page
   for logout is totally useless for normal people and that Irix
   doesn't even have a man page for this. Of course, there's a perfectly
   logical deep technical reason for this, but it's still a bad idea.
   Shame on all you developers.

And another example that happened to me yesterday. I wanted a quick
way to convert between binary, "normal" numbers, and hex. At first
I thought 'od' might help, and failing that, I thought 'dc'. 'od'
didn't help, and with a sigh I turned to 'man dc'. I couldn't find
anything remotely helpful. Then a friend on IRC told me how to do
this: 2o[number]p  for "turn [number] into binary". I went back to 
the man page and found "o - Pops the value off the top of the stack 
and uses it to set the output radix".

Of course. How could I have seen 'output radix' and failed to realise
this meant "base" and that popping the value of the top of the stack
was exactly what I wanted to do? (Note, I dropped maths at 16, and
my limited language knowledge gave me the idea that radix meant root :))

Then there is the man page for CVS. All I wanted was "how do I 
get a list of all the modules in this CVS tree?" After a friend
told me about "cvs checkout -c" I was able to find the one sentence
in the very long page which explained it, but what I really learned
was "how the cvs man page describes what anyone else would call
'getting a list of the modules available'".

So yes, reading the documentation helps, but it takes a lot of
practice to understand it.

Telsa