[openbox] Skipping Windows in ALT-TAB Task List?

Adam Kessel adam at rosi-kessel.org
Sat Jun 12 09:47:43 EDT 2004


On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 08:09:15PM -0700, Marc Wilson wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 05:03:31PM -0400, Adam Kessel wrote:
> > On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 16:48, Mikael Magnusson wrote:
> > I don't mind downloading and building tarballs, but when you've got 3000
> > packages installed on your machine...
> You've got 3k packages installed on your machine?  That's really, really
> sad.  I've got 1285 packages installed on my Sid box, and I'm thinning that
> out all the time.

Flame bait?  Why is it 'really, really sad'?  I develop for several
different platforms, run a parallel test environment for a production
machine that has several database servers, web servers, etc..  I'm not
sure why it's sad (?).

> > automatically upgrades them when new versions are released, rather than
> > having to check all 3000 of them every week or so.
> So you don't bother to check them to see if you're potentially replacing a
> working version with a broken one, or with one that has any number of other
> problems?  That's also sad.

Sure.  I use apt-listbugs, which reports all bugs filed against new
upgrades of packages.  I also use apt-listchanges, which reports the
changelog differences from the currently installed version to the new
upgrade.  I also wait a few days between doing an apt-get update (to get
the list of newly available packages) and apt-get upgrade (to actually
get the packages) so others will file bugs before I actually get the
upgrade.

In the past year, I can't recall a single upgrade that seriously broke my
system.

In any case, my point was that I'd rather not check hundreds or thousands
of sourceforge pages or wherever the package comes from to see if a new
version is available.  When a new version is available--that potentially
fixes bugs or patches security vulnerabilities--the Debian maintainer
shephards it into Debian and it appears in the next upgrade.

> > Also, thousands of Debian users will never even know wmctrl exists
> > unless it's in the distribution.
> You're joking, of course.  How does it being in the distribution solve
> their utter cluelessness?  Joe Stupid can't be bothered to STFW?  He can't
> be bothered to learn the slightest thing about how to search for package
> that ARE in the distribution, either.

I'm not joking.  The first place I go to look for a package is in the
Debian distribution.  It's a lot more efficient than STFW, because you
know it will work and you don't have to worry about dependencies, etc..

My experience of the average Debian user is that they are not Joe Stupid,
but themselves developers, sysadmins, etc., who appreciate an efficient
and well organized packaging system, rather than googling around to find
a tarball, unpack, check to see if they can use it under the license,
check around on some mailing lists to see if there are any crucial
security vulnerabilities they should know about, download the
build-dependencies, discover that the build-dependencies conflict with
other packages installed, etc...  Debian takes care of all that.

> Witness all the utter morons who whine about how Sid is now up to, what,
> thirteen CD's?  No, I have no idea what the exact number is, I don't need
> to.  I actually know how to use the search tools rather than downloading
> umpteen ISO(s).

I don't think I've ever used more than 2, or maybe 3 CDs to do a Debian
install.  In fact, I usually just use the USB-disk sized boot image.  You
do need a lot of CDs if you want every Debian package and all the source
code as well, but usually you don't install source code along with every
package unless you plan on modifying it.

> And it's not Debian's job to worry about whether Joe Stupid knows about
> some hacky little tool anyway.

More flame bait?  I'm not sure if you're just adopting this tone to play
devil's advocate, but it seems to me that you've quite misunderstood the
purpose of the distribution.
-- 
Adam Kessel
http://adam.rosi-kessel.org



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