This is the mail archive of the
cygwin-xfree@cygwin.com
mailing list for the Cygwin XFree86 project.
Re: problems with XFree
Dennis Foreman wrote:
Harold,
Since you admit to having to play with addresses, could you PLEASE not send
postings to me twice. I am now getting ONE from the LIST and ANOTHER direct,
for YOUR replies to my postings.
Since you deprecated my use of your personal email address, I have no
recourse but to post my reply here. After this, I will remain silent, use
what's here and take my lumps.
No problem. Your message was unclear as to whether it was intentionally
sent off-list. You seemed to blame Outlook for your troubles later in
the message, so I went ahead and cc'd cygwin-xfree.
If freeware was supposed to stop the incompatibilities across multiple
incarnations of UNIX, it has failed. Code that works on one Linux fails on
another (see postings to pthreads & LEDA lists), code that works on LINUX
fails on SunOS or AIX. I don't see any improvement to the end user. My days
as an active programmer are over. The option of contributing assumes I know
something about the internals of "UNIX". I don't. And I don't want to
either. I am now taking time to enjoy my family (as you want to enjoy
yours). I do however occasionally need to delve into the "UNIX" environment,
so there are some tools I use that may not be commercially available or
which I am directed to use by others.
With open-source and free-software you have two choices:
1) Take what you get
2) Don't take what you get
Unless, of course, you are willing to contribute.
As for knowledge of how UNIX works... I had no knowledge when I started
working on this project and I still have hardly any knowledge. However,
I am able to read the docs and the source to learn what I need on a
daily basis. Anyone can easily contribute to this project in less than
a week, if not a single day.
Will the REAL UNIX please stand up? There are MANY arguments for/against
any specific version. I don't really care. I just want code that's easy to
use, works and runs as documented. Look what happened to OS/2. Great
capabilities, lousy documentation, hard to use by novices. Look at MSWins:
fair abilities, decent (not great) docs and REALLY easy to use for novices
doing common things. Look who has the market share! How many PC's come with
ANY version of Linux as the default?
A valid observation, but you forgot one thing: we are not paid to do this.
BTW, since Solaris came first, why not emulate what they had? And make it
better.
[Smoke billows from Harold's keyboard as he quickly rewrites 20 years of
open-source and free-software to be compatible with Solaris, because
Dennis Foreman thought it would be a neat idea.] Nice idea, but you
will have to work on that one yourself.
regards,
D. J. Foreman, Ph. D.
Dept of Computer Science
Binghamton University
website: http://WWW.CS.Binghamton.EDU/~foreman
Harold