[PLUG] RANT: Sofa King GUIs, Sofa King PKG Mgmt

Michael Rasmussen mikeraz at patch.com
Mon Jul 18 02:26:00 UTC 2005


Scenario #1 - A Tale of Two Package Management Systems

I run a mix of APT and RPM based systems.  I'll find the same functionality on both
system types, but supplied by different programs.  If I want the meta data from 
my digital camera photos I use exif on the apt systems and jhead on the RPM systems.

This got to be maddening enough in recalling the sytax to extract the information
that I finally just dumped them all and loaded Image::ExifTool from CPAN 

A quickie Perl program works on all my systems and is easy to munge to extract 
whatever information I need on a particular day for whatever purpose.

Scenario #2 - Pain in the GUI 

Discovering that the most recent set of install CDs on hand were from May 2004
I downloaded new ISOs to burn.  Fine, but since the last time I've burned a CD
I've upgraded xcdroast and it's broken.  It insists on trying to work with
/dev/pg and there's no (findable to my mind) to tell it and it's auto detection
stupidity to just use /dev/cdrom.  I can cut and paste the command line from the 
error log and replace the "dev =" and write CDs just fine.  

If I manually edit ~/.cdroast/xcdr098.cfg it will work.  But the point of a GUI is 
not to have users hand editing config files in hidden directories.


Scenario #3 - Auto Pretty Install is fine until ...

You reboot the machine and the mis-written GRUB config isn't bootable.  

Bah.

Beer time.


Thanks to the home brewer who named his beers "Sofa King Stout", "Sofa King IPA" and so
on.  He was a good enough brewer that three or four of his brews made it to the national
finals and won medals.  The American Homebrewer Association refused to print the names
of his beers in the awards list.  The next year all of his brews were named "You wouldn't
print it anyway STYLE".


-- 
    Michael Rasmussen, Portland Oregon  
  Be appropriate && Follow your curiosity
 http://meme.patch.com/memes/BicycleRiding
   Get Fixed:  http://www.dampfixie.org
  The fortune cookie says:
Please help keep the world clean: others may wish to use it.




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