F21 partitioning circus

[Chris Murphy]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 4:44 PM, Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
> On 02/25/2015 03:27 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>>
>> But no, you were just being a discourteous
>> person.
>
>
> Actually, until you made it clear that one of your main reasons for posting
> was to create dissension,

You keep making these grandiose, broad sweeping, and false assertions:

You want to take [Linux flexibility] away.
I see: you're simply a troll.
you're completely unwilling to accept the possibility that you might be wrong

And now this latest distortion of "I also like causing dissonance in
others when I think they're wrong" which is hardly the main reason for
my posts, let alone clearly so, let alone even about dissension.

And that's just today. Please stop.


> Last, I'd like to point out that I've not been asking for things that I
> personally need, I've been supporting my position on a matter of principle:
> specifically the principle that the person doing the installation should be
> the final judge of how they want things set up, not the developers.

OK well you're wrong on the matter of principle because "wanting" is
not good enough. There is no entitlement without the work. Users are
routinely terrible at articulating what they want, so even building
what they say they want is folly. They're only saying they wan  a
thing because they don't know what else to ask for or how to ask it. I
reject the principle the user is always right (or the developer, or me
for that matter).

And self evidently you're wrong on the matter of turning your
principle into practice. The very fact your principle can't
consistently be realized except through developer coercion to build
things against their better judgement and always and only "what the
user wants" is how demonstrably flawed it is.

We need more work narrowing the difference between developer and user,
so that users can more easily be developers, or even get so far as to
blur the line entirely. But if anything, we're seeing computing get
farther and farther away from this, more and more specialized as users
and developers go separate ways. You cannot fix that problem by
pontificating some abstract principle subscribing to the user want
being an inherent good. It's already difficult to fix this problem
because the current paradigm means growing numbers of developers and
users, so current behaviors are self-rewarding (or at worst, they seem
safe).

I like this Steve Job quote: But in the end, for something this
complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A
lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to
them.


-- 
Chris Murphy