Re: gEDA-user: gschem with cairo rendering

[Dave McGuire <mcguire@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On May 5, 2008, at 5:43 PM, Marvin Dickens wrote:
> The following is an opinion and nothing more - Designing the
> architecture of a program and then writing code for it like it's  
> 1999 in
> the year 2008 makes no sense whatsoever to me. Yes, I know the  
> argument
> about writing code for the lowest common denominator hardware. But,  
> even
> so, in my opinion, there is only so low you can go with hardware and
> still justify what you are doing.

   It's not a matter of lowest common denominator hardware...it's a  
matter of assumed availability of every whiz-bang pre-1.0 library in  
the Linux world.  Most big commercial UNIX installations (and there  
are a lot more of them than many Linux folk are willing to  
acknowledge) don't subscribe to the "upgrade libraries every other  
week" mentality.  In a production environment, such a cavalier  
attitude to systems administration just doesn't fly.  And just TRY to  
get an overly-conservative network admin to build and install a  
library whose release number is less than 1.0 even though it has been  
around for a decade or more and is rock solid.  This is very common  
in the Linux world, and the commercial UNIX world just can't wrap  
their brains around that concept.

   Even on my primary server on my home network (a big Sun running  
Solaris10), the /usr filesystem is shared by seven virtual machines  
that are doing seven very different things.  If I go dicking with  
shared libraries indiscriminately there, I could break something else  
that I'm doing, or worse, something of someone else's...either of  
which could have a material impact on my income.

   As of right now, gEDA isn't just for students and hobbyists.   
Commercial concerns do take it seriously.  If you want to destroy  
that, and MAKE it only suitable for students and hobbyists, then the  
fastest way to do that is to make it depend on fifty Linux-only  
pre-1.0 libraries.

             -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL




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