MacBook

[Michael Butash]

I remember trying the static compile approach back circa 2000 with linux 
and slackware.  After I'd learned Solaris, and why to hate it (making 
gnu software compile on it to not be a useless/costly linux), a buddy 
got me into Slackware, helping me install it, and how to compile a 
kernel and source.  I began compiling everything static as possible, 
particularly the kernel, and when I began growing/exploring/learning, it 
was just a constant "recompile this for this, recompile that for this 
too, and 50 other things".  I learned why that was a bad idea pretty 
quickly.

I moved to Freebsd shortly thereafter, tried compling everything, and 
found that didn't work well either once you have to jump releases.  I 
already hated RedHat by that time with RPM-hell (pre yum, debatable if 
better after), and tried everything from mandrake to suse, finally 
landing on ubuntu that combined with debian apt, made shared libs 
somewhat manageable.  Ten years later, even with effort to leave Ubuntu, 
I'm still here, and remains the most painless, even though pain still 
comes a plenty.

Again, I see pain in every os, particularly still windoze in this day 
and age, where for crying out loud with daily patches for the past 20 
years, you'd think could figure out how the game works as a direct 
result of their incessantly poor security.  A week to fix a bad patch 
for a major security service pack release!?  People are getting fired 
for it, quite literally - why would any enterprise trust them in good 
conscience?

And yeah, Amazon.  Fund lawyers, sue them for being dirtbags, spend 2 
years in court, and after lawyer fees get $200 dollars for passing go 
and wasting exponentially more effort than attributable to lost wages.  
At this point I tell her she just needs to find a not crappy company 
that respects their employees to work for, but yeah, dubiously legally 
otherwise.  For a technology company, the CS side of things is 
apparently dysfunctional as all get out.

A buddy was trying to get me to move to Seattle to work with AWS...  I 
used this on-going story as a reason why not to even try.  Even he was a 
bit stunned.

-mb


On 08/25/2016 08:55 PM, Eric Oyen wrote:
> anyway, it sounds to me like we need to adopt some of the apple method here. Instead of having system level libraries that handle the heavy lifting, that each app  have it all compiled in. This should cut down on a lot of issues, although it might introduce others.
>
> -eric