Re: CML2 design philosophy heads-up

Charles Cazabon
2001-05-18T15:34:33Z

Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> wrote:
> Arjan van de Ven <arjanv@redhat.com>:
> > Aunt Tillie doesn't even know what a kernel is, nor does she want
> > to. I think it's fair to assume that people who configure and
> > compile their own kernel (as opposed to using the distribution
> > supplied ones) know what they are doing.
>
> I'd like to break these assumptions. Or at the very least see how far
> they can be bent. I know this sounds crazy to a lot of hackers, but
> I think there's a certain amount of unhelpful elitism and self-puffery
> in the "kernels are hard to configure and they *should* be hard to
> configure* attitude. Let's give Aunt Tillie a chance to surprise us.

Whether this is desirable or not is debatable. The big question is: why on
earth would Aunt Tillie _want_ to compile a kernel at all, let alone
re-configure one? If she's using Linux, she's installing her distribution's
pre-compiled kernel, and has no need for anything else.

Simplifying the configuration interface so that "anyone" can use it seems like
a waste of effort. If there's an interested novice out there who wants to
learn how to configure a kernel, they'll be sufficiently interested to invest
an hour or two in learning how the whole process works. Make it as simple as
it needs to be, and no simpler.

Charles
--
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Charles Cazabon <linux@discworld.dyndns.org>
GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/
Any opinions expressed are just that -- my opinions.
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