[Fedora-packaging] Re: paragraph on shipping static numerical libs

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 11:47 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 10:15:01AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 09:44 +0200, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > > On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 09:34:20AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > They use Linux/Unix because "somebody told them so", they program in
> > > > Fortran, Cobol, Algol or Modula, because "somebody told them so", they
> > > > do something "this way" because they don't know better and don't "want
> > > > to know better".
> > > 
> > > That's a bit of oversimplification.
> > I've worked in such an environment for many years, I know what I am
> > talking about.
> > 
> > An anecdote: I once met an EE-professor, who, when being asked why they
> > were using Fortran answered: "Because our simulations are based on the
> > Fortran punch cards I wrote during my PhD thesis 25 years ago".
> > Consequently, his students and employees were programming Fortran.
> > 
> > >  In general scientists do coding 
> > > just fine but don't want to do more nor even think about it (no 
> > > packaging, no thoughts on system administration...).
> > Well, in 90% of all such cases, "their coding" goes into implementing
> > complex algorithms, while their programs complexity is not much
> > different from "hello world".
> 
> This sounds quite arrogant.

Feel free to think what you want - These number cruncher guys apps
condense down to a 

READ STDIN
CALL ALGORITHM
PRINT STDOUT

Their typical usage:

./myapp < inputdata >output
... wait <couple of days> ...
lpr output

> > >  However there 
> > > are IT people working together with scientists who do system 
> > > administration well.
> > 
> > > Still the needs are specific and very different from other environments.
> > I can not disagree more.
> > 
> > These guys relation to programming / sys-administration is not much
> > different from that of a 14-year old kid, whose IT skills are "browsing
> > the web, running games, playing mp3s and using word processors", when it
> > had a course in "programming in C" at school, and then starts to
> > discover the subtleties of programming afterwards.
> 
> And in their spare time they invented the web including the first
> implementation of web servers and clients.
May-be some of them ... The others were busy keeping their machines hot.

Ralf