Pointless rant: Red Hat Enterprise Server sucks!

[Matt Graham]

On Friday 10 August 2007 09:46, after a long battle with technology, 
Daniel P. Stasinski wrote:
> In essence, it is similar to people fleeing California (because
> California sucks?) to come to Arizona, and then they go about trying
> to create the very thing they left by proposing laws, planting grass
> in a desert and not using their turn signals.

I think people do that no matter where they're trying to flee or what 
they're trying to flee from.  It's not quite as ironclad as "upper 
management do completely moronic things", but it's a useful general 
rule.

> I use a spiffy little C compiler called TinyCC that is fast enough to
> compile a Linux kernel from source in about 12 seconds.

Whoa.  Which options were turned on?  Was it a full build, or partial?  
Did the compiled kernel work properly, without userspace displaying 
strange behavior?  I'd guess so, but more info would be interesting.

> Same thing with AOLserver.   People complain that it doesn't have
> Apache features like php and perl modules, .htaccess, etc.   No it
> doesn't.  It's not Apache and hopefully will never be!  It fills a
> very specific need and does it quite well.

"Feature creep".  It happens all over the place.  (Well, maybe not with 
Slackware.)  It's sort of like the old story about Stone Soup, although 
every feature requester tends to put in bugs as well as new features.

> If someone is used to Suse, use Suse!   If they are forced to move to
> a new platform, learn the new platform and don't look back.

Retaining knowledge from the old platform can be really useful in some 
cases, though.  My SuSE knowledge is years out of date, but I could 
probably still fix a SuSE box.  ("grep -ri" is *never* out of date 
though.)

> Every O/S project fills a certain niche market and if we go about 
> trying to unify them all then all we will end up up with is bloated 
> MS type products.

I hear you about the niches.  (You will take my vim and my slrn when 
you've pried my keyboard from the shattered skulls of my enemies!)  
Bloat, though, tends to result from users wanting new features.  And 
they *always* want new features.

-- 
   I think I'll have to put on 500 pounds of subwoofers, amps, and other
   delicious herbs.  --MegaHAL, trained on ASR
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see