Obtuse code was Re: [ale] Ernie Ball says F.Y.

[Christopher Ness]

On Saturday 23 August 2003 01:54 pm, Jim Philips wrote:

> The other problem that many open source Linux programmers often have is
> that they can't resist the temtptation to do something obscure. Example:
>
>
> Xmonkey--programmed entirely in the doohickey programming language. For
> those not familiar with doohickey, it does all of the same things that
> you can do in C and C++ (but that wouldn't be any fun). Along with
> doohickey, you will need the doohickey-Gtk bindings, version 1.9210976
> or higher. You can build Xmonkey without installing doohickey-xml2, but
> you will lose 80% of the functionality. Before installing doohickey,
> please install any 12 of my favorite CPAN modules. You must also install
> the sdfhjg libraries (which haven't been updated since 1999). These may
> require you to downgrade your existing glibs and clibs, but no
> biggie...and so on.

Don't forget recursive dependancies! You must update "libA" to update "libB" 
but libB needs libA updated. 

> And if some Joe user is smart enough to get through this ordeal, he may
> find that he doesn't even like Xmonkey. 

Or after updating LibA libB ProgC and changing the permissions that each 
installs with to something sane and runable, forgets why he was doing all 
this in the first place.

I wish Freshmeat--or
> somebody--would rate open source programs for complexity of
> dependencies. A system like:
>
> standard Gnome2 + _______________________________
> standard KDE +    _______________________________

Which standard KDE - its one of the worst! Nothing from previous versions will 
compile on current versions and warning will say "version 2.2 or better" and 
not work on 2.2.1.

> I just went through an ordeal like the one I described above and it
> makes you wonder if the people who do these things don't secretly hate
> Linux and want to destroy it.

Or they just want to show how clever they are.

-- 
Chris Ness
mailto:cnessatearthlink.net               All jobs are equally easy to
http://home.earthlink.net/~cness           the person not doing the work.
			   			    Holt's Law


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