[Sussex] Salutations!

[Geoff Teale]

On Sunday 20 April 2003 11:56 pm, Alan Fitton wrote:
> The problem i find with RedHat and Mandrake is that their strength also
> becomes their weakness. Countless features are implemented (often not very
> well) that merely complicate the system and make it hard for a user
> interested in customising it to know what is going on under the hood. I
> appreciate a system i can build up, not strip down.

Yes, this is a real problem, but those distros have got better - the GUI tools 
for sysadmin used to mangle any manual changes you made pretty badly, that 
has improved.

> Also, when I installed RedHat 9 it somehow managed to "forget" to install
> ANY modules, leaving the system quite useless until i recompiled (and
> debugged) their warped kernel sources.
>
> I tend to visualise Slackware as carefully linked blocks forming a nice
> shape, and distros like RedHat and Mandrake as big, ugly blobs of paper
> mache....

Well, as this list is populated (or at least the vocal portion of it) mainly 
by Debian, Gentoo and Slackware users I think you're going to find a whole 
lot of agreement for that particular point of view ;-)

> I'm most interested in learning C++, Perl and PHP. I think I would get the
> most benefit from these. Perl for general system administration and CGI
> (sure, you can use other languages for CGI but I would say perl is best
> suited, generally). PHP would be very useful for www stuff. I like
> interpreted langauges, they make things much simpler though not suited for
> everything mainly because of performance.

The performance of interpreted languages is very rarely the issue these days 
(unless you're writing high speed 3d games, doing simulation or mass-batch 
processing), it's a question of where they lack power.  There are certain 
tasks that require a finer grain of control over the computer.  However, 
there are a lot of security analysts who feel the biggest security problem in 
the world is macho programmers using low-level languages when they don't need 
to.  Why deal, for example, with all the problems that can occur writing a 
program using sockets in C/C++ (in terms of buffer overruns, etc.) when you 
can use Python/Perl/Ruby/PHP  and be sure that those bugs have been ironed 
out already?

> My enocunter with TCL was making a simple Mohammed Al-Sahaf (the Iraqi
> information minister with his dubious claims) quote script for an IRC
> channel I'm in on EFnet, turned out to be a good laugh. Helped me get to
> grips with TCL.

TCL is a decent enough tool.  Funnily enough Mohammed Al-Sahaf came up on this 
list quite recently - rumour has it he now works in Microsofts marketing 
department :-)

-- 
GJT
Free Software Foundation
tealeg at member.fsf.org