[lug] Daily system crash....

[David Morris]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 11:05:07PM -0700, Nate Duehr wrote:
>
> On Jan 28, 2008, at 8:06 PM, David L. Anselmi wrote:
>
>> I keep telling people that aptitude is the killer app in
>> package  management.  All packages that I specifically
>> care about are marked  "installed by me".  All others are
>> marked "installed due to  dependencies".  Then removing
>> packages and all their depends is easy.
>>
>> Now you're all crossing your eyes and wondering what
>> language I'm  speaking.
>
> Not me.  I'm a "true believer" and have been since long
> before RedHat  had yum, etc... the dpkg/apt/aptitude chain
> just rocks the planet.  Yum and RedHat Network and all
> that stuff has NEVER caught up to what the dpkg/apt tools
> could ALWAYS do from Day 1.  Something to be said for
> THINKING about the design instead of implementing it first
> and then having to hack other things on later...

Won't get any argument here either.  Great software.  I just
mucked up the system royally on the initial install because
I was in a hurry and gnome infected all sorts of stuff that
I've been cleaning it out of ever since.

> (Now the iterative coders doing the trendy team coding and
> all that  "small tight code loops" thing are going to
> start throwing tomatoes at  me, but I really think that
> time spent DESIGNING up front, is better  time spent than
> coding crud and having to remove the cruft later... but I
> also don't code for a living, so... my opinion is based
> solely on the apparent end-results, and not the work that
> needs to Just Get Done that coders live with every day and
> try to manage.)

As a software *engineer* by trade I can but agree.  I've met
a lot of brilliant people who could code circles around me,
but in all that flurry of coding they all have lost sight of
what they are actually doing.  As a result I *invariably*
end up with an application which is smaller, faster,
simpler, more robust, more flexible, more maintainable,
better documented, *and* in less time than *anyone* I've met
who uses the "extreme" programming fads.

Those programmers (who have no concept of what engineering
is) are all missing one basic fact:  It takes several orders
of magnitude more effort to fix a problem after it exists,
than to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

The problem, of course, is that corporations have no
incentive to create bug-free software that does everything
the users want the first time around because consumers won't
accept the required sales cost.

Which leads, of course, to the fact that consumers are, as a
class, total morons.  People are willing to pay thousands of
dollars on the buy-support-upgrade-replace cycle if it is
spread across a span of years, yet refuse to shell out a
mere few hundred dollars on a product that works right the
first time around.

/end rant

--David