[ut2004] No love with linux installer

[Sean Hamilton]

| I'd like to know one single commercial Linux distribution
| that does not have Joliet support compiled into their
| standard kernel. I've personally used Red Hat, Mandrake,
| SuSE, and now even Slackware and all of them did. It

I agree, my case was an anomaly. It's just that I don't
expect to need to read Microsoft-specific extensions off of
CDs on my Linux system. In years, this has been the first
time it has caused problems.

Had these CDs been distributed with rockridge extensions, or
with 8.3 filenames, this wouldn't have been a problem. Both
of those are totally sane expectations. There is no practical
reason for the files on the CD to not be 8.3. Of course, these
are issues with the publisher, and I doubt they are open to
suggestion.

| strikes me a bit strange to complain that the installer
| could not compensate for something you failed to compile
| into your kernel.

I'm not expecting the installer to say "Whoops, I couldn't
find this file, but I did find a similarly named file. This
probably means you haven't got Joliet extensions in your
kernel." However, I DO expect it to not just silently discard
an error. Had it told me it couldn't find a file, along with
that filename, it would have taken me a second to check the
CD, note that I do have a similarly named file, and fix the
problem. Instead I had to trace the system calls to find the
error. That is NOT good software. Even high school kids in
their programming class know not to silently discard errors.

Who wrote this thing? Does he read this list? Can he comment?
Justify these decisions?

| Go ahead and do it, but what you describe doesn't sound
| newbie-friendly and it certainly doesn't sound any easier
| than the Loki installer.

Evidently your definition of ease is flawed. GTK interfaces
are no substitute for good design.

-- 
Sean Hamilton <sh at bel.bc.ca>