RANT!!! (was Re: ORBit and gint64 Re: ORBit gmake fails)

[Todd Graham Lewis <tlewis mindspring net>]

On Wed, 22 Jul 1998, Elliot Lee wrote:

> If you're getting problems, they can be solved in two ways.
> 
> 	- Configure & install the latest glib from CVS.
> 	- Configure & install the latest ORBit from CVS (I committed the
> 	  changes this afternoon).

Elliot, not to pick on you, but can I again voice my displeasure at
this method of notifying people of when they need to recompile logically
superior systems from CVS?  I mean, Jesus Christ people, these are
_versioning_ issues.  It's not like it's not a well-understood problem.

If not rpm-based dependencies, then how about a little "if VERSION < 3.14
then ERROR" sprinkled here and there for the sake of us mere mortals?
Or maybe some sort of "you need to recompile now" message which is more
formal than an unformatted notice in one of the 10,000 CHANGELOG's
sprinkled through the CVS tree?  

Heck, I'm more than happy to do a "make $everything_that_needs_remaking"
before I sit down to a session of playing with gnome, provided that
there is some way for me to do that other than to read the CVS messages
in addition to the mailing list, which is voluminous enough.  It needs
to be reliable and not require manual intervention.  And it needs to stop
stuff like my spending 45 minutes hacking around a stupid problem that
I could have identified and solved if only I had had a way to do so.

I find this very frustrating.  Between work and my girlfriend, I
have limited time to play with gnome.  She is doing laundry tonight,
and so I had a few hours to kill.  Rather than spending it on more
productive pursuits, I spent it solving a problem caused by sloppy
project management.  If this were a commercial software project rather
than a volunteer effort, then I would be yelling at my boss right now
about this.  

I've been playing with gnome since day 1, and I'm not about to quit the
project, but I am concerned that if we don't do a better job of making
the project friendly for the part-time, amateur developer, then the
only people who will be able to work on gnome are college students and
RedHat employees.  Real-life programmers, and trust me, I've actually
met some, don't have enough time to fuck with this bullshit, and this
sort of episode leaves a very sour taste in my mouth.

Again, Elliot, I don't mean to pick on you individually; plenty of
people have been doing similar things.  It's a real problem, and we
need to find some way to fix it.

--
Todd Graham Lewis                                     (800) 719-4664, x2804
******Linux******         MindSpring Enterprises      tlewis@mindspring.net