The Long Goodbye

Andy Green andy at warmcat.com
Wed Feb 21 18:55:28 UTC 2007


Eric S. Raymond wrote:

> I can tell you the library in question was libcom_err, and I think I
> deleted it when removing e2fsprogs-libs to get around a file conflict.
> But with rpm not working I couldn't reinstall the library.  Boot failed,
> ssh/sshd failed -- I had to kluge with netcat and tar just to back up
> my files.  It was horrible.  
> 
> Alas, I no longer have the logs, as I lost them during installation.
> I don't recall what the file was, but the conflict was completely
> avoidable and would never have occurred if the repo and RPMs had been
> in a sane state.

Why does "booted from the install media in recovery mode" not feature in 
this anywhere?  Then you could have wgetted

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/e2fsprogs-libs-1.39-7.i386.rpm

from inside the recovery boot and installed it after a chroot or with 
--root= on rpm.

Yesterday I rendered this laptop unbootable by broken code I added to 
the iwlwifi driver sources: I was back up in five minutes thanks to the 
recovery boot, deleting the driver and rebooting into the kernel so I 
could fix it and go on.

That experience, like each time I use the recovery boot, left me feeling 
grateful for the feature and empowered, that even with a half trashed 
system I can force it back to life.  Whereas without it, you were left 
feeling very different.

> To no visible result.  You had the developers, the first-mover
> advantage, and the corporate backing; you lacked the vision and the
> will to follow through.  Ubuntu shows what could have been done -- but
> if you guys had executed correctly, Ubuntu's market- and mindshare
> would be at best statistical noise (if it existed at all).

...

> its root.  They might get it solved in time to meet the 64-bit
> deadline Rob Landley and I have seen coming, but Fedora clearly will
> not.  So much for Fedora.

Rob sent me a link to your thesis some weeks ago, but as I told him then 
it seems completely bogus to me.  Some geeky metric like the sizeof(int) 
going to control whether the man in the street switches OS or not.

Crushing Ubuntu isn't what the other OSes are about.  If you look at it 
from, say, a Gnome or kernel perspective where RHAT are active, is it a 
loser globally for RHAT if Gnome or the kernel are gaining in popularity 
in another distro?  So it is a lot more nuanced, Fedora is not a 
commercial entity where there is per-user revenue and retarding the 
competition advances yourself.  While there are hundreds of thousands of 
users it has a lot of meaning, especially seen as a Fedora / RHEL / 
CentOS axis where the OS semantics are all compatible.  I paid to get my 
*RH*CE, a Canonical or Linspire version won't do.

-Andy




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