[Info-vax] BASIC compiler in the hobbyist distribution

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On Sun, 31 May 2015 07:16:54 -0700 (PDT)
seasoned_geek via Info-vax <info-vax at rbnsn.com> wrote:

> > Linux has thousands of developers and tens of thousands of applications
> > developers. Anybody can report a bug. But Linux and 99.9% of the apps
> > that run on it are still crapware. And those guys are motivated!
> > They're just mostly clueless and wrong.
> 
> Oh, it is faaaaaaaaaaaaaaar worse than that. Having been working with Qt
> and dealing with Ubuntu, Mint, and half a dozen other distros. I will
> leave out the years of living in RPM hell dealing with OpenSuSE, Fedora,
> and that ilk.
> 
> Those developers aren't "motivated" much beyond putting "Linux Package A
> maintainer" in big bold letters on their resume followed in very small
> print by "for distro x".

I meant the kernel developers are motivated. Sometimes by money, sometimes
by fear, but motivated. The application developers vary from very motivated
to I wrote this ten years ago while high on something and if you use it
don't forget it's GPL. Most are somewhere in the middle to low-end though.

I'm amazed anybody can suggest enterprises are using Linux for mission-critical
anything, even with Red Hat Premier Support. 

> Yes, anyone "can" report a bug, unless you are talking about Ubuntu where
> they periodically lock bug reporting out and only report bugs via a
> specific channel for people who subscribe, then install and run full
> debug versions of everything (makes my 6-core with 24G of RAM run like a
> 286 with DOS 4.0)

Very true and very annoying. You need mailing list managers and a whole
email setup just to report problems. That is not a good system. There
doesn't look to be a fix for that kind of thing coming in Linux's future.

Anyway my "anyone can report a bug" was meant to be taken literally. You
can report all you want. As you said it often takes a lot of committment to
actually report a bug. But the only guarantee is you can usually report a
bug. After that, nobody knows.

In my experience open source doesn't help. Having a support contract and
guys on the other end with contractual responsibility and staff does.

> My all time favorite is the Konsole package maintainer. Supposedly VT-100
> and several other VT levels of compatibility. When I was writing one of
> my books I was actually trying to use this emulator with EDT/LSE. It was
> about 80% there. I contacted the maintainer. Reported what wasn't
> working. He responded that he was just a maintainer and didn't have the
> hardware to test it. I then offered to create him an account on my DS-10.
> Not interested. I then pointed him to Death Row Cluster where he could
> get a free account, test to his hearts content, and make the product
> work. "I know nothing bout that platform and don't want to learn."

This kind of attitude makes it less and likely so-called "portable" code
will ever actually be portable since a lot of those guys don't know
anything besides Linux and Windows exist and they aren't interested in
Windows. It happens to me a lot trying to build apps on Solaris. Most need
a full stack of gnu crapware. Piles and piles of piles.

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