Re: [gentoo-user] Re: 4 machines - no /dev/cdrom or /dev/dvd anymore

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2013 12:26:04 -0800
Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 1:21 AM, Alan McKinnon
> <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote: <SNIP>
> > Life is full of silly and not-so-silly conventions and /dev/dvd is
> > one of them. It has no good reason to be there, and equally no good
> > reason to not be there, but you already fixed your stuff to make it
> > do what you want.
> <SNIP>
> > --
> > Alan McKinnon
> 
> Alan,
>    Maybe in the future you'll consider this story: For your
> entertainment, please imagine an 82 year old woman who, unknown to
> anyone, has somehow gone beyond simple web browsing and email and
> managed to teach herself to watch a DVD on her Gentoo laptop. Possibly
> she is hard of hearing? This works well for her as she can use
> headphones and listen at levels that work for her any time of day or
> night. Once you get your head around that picture, please imagine this
> user being frustrated for _months_ when her 'no good reason to be
> there DVD' goes away. This user feels, for no good technical reason,
> that she has somehow hurt her computer and worse worries about the
> costs of fixing it. She remains silent, doesn't ask for help and loses
> access to something that she enjoys all because someone in the dev
> community decides to 'make a change'.

I see what you want to communicate with that story, it's just not a
circumstance unique to Gentoo or even Linux. All computers and all
operating systems that upgrade go through the same thing, be it
Windows, Ubuntu, MacOS, Android, iOS, the other IOS, the whole lot of
them do this and break stuff if you let them update. MacOS has most
certainly got to be the worst - they almost have an official policy to
break APIs wantonly for fun and never supporting the breakage past the
next version. Windows fares best as the corporate customers insist of a
large measure of backwards compatibility.

Unfortunately that is the nature of today's connected world.

There is a way around it though, which is to not update the software
and apply only bug and security fixes. Think Ubuntu LTS here - that
would nicely solve the problem for the non-tech-savvy 82 year old and
it's a good compromise: no sudden unexplained changes together with a
good degree of safety

But for your own use you have chosen Gentoo with it's implicit agreement
that you will keep both pieces. You've always been upfront about your
use case and why you chose Gentoo, and I took notice. It's now quite a
few years down the track and you are still here. The ricers have all
come and gone[1], but Mark is still here. Apparently Gentoo still suits
his needs for the most part, and he's dealing with Gentoo just fine.


>    Not every user (of Gentoo or any other distro) lives in the
> rarefied world of a Linux Sys Admin, much less the far more lowly and
> infinitely more mundane world I inhabit. My experience is that people
> almost always need a little help and almost never ask.

I'll tell you a short story in return. Over the festive period I had
need to describe myself briefly. Without thinking I blurted out
"Borderline bipolar, OCD and somewhat Emo...". 

I'm not really into self-diagnosis, but that description seems to fit.
I know I shoot my mouth off too often, but you shouldn't take it
personally. Software is engineering - there's a few ways it can be done
right, and lots of ways it can be done wrong (all fully documented...).

When I talk about these things I usually forget I'm talking to people,
not machines. So I apologize for my tone - I could have said the same
thing in a very different way and gotten a very different result.

I would so much prefer to not draw comparisons between sysadmins and
users - experience teaches that nothing good comes out of that. If you
describe yourself as a regular user then that's cool by me, I'd just
like to point out again that many years later you are still here and the
ricers aren't - that's gotta count for something.

For my part, I think you contribute more back to this community than
you might give yourself credit for. "Mere user" is not a good
description of where you fit in



[1] I'm not sure where that crowd all went.... they migrated en-masse
to Ubuntu a while back, then to Fedora. I think they might be hanging
out at Arch currently...



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com