Mail Archives: cygwin/2003/03/06/17:40:49
Pavel Tsekov wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Mar 2003, DH wrote:
>
>> For the love of open source, is the setup.exe dialog listing the
>> packages ever going to get bigger?
>>
>> I've searched the mailing list and people complained about this before.
>>
>> What is the hold up? (3 months back I got so frustrated by this I
>> swore off cygwin up until today)
>
> People requesting this functionality stick only to complaining and not
> actually implementing it.
Probably shooting myself in the foot....
Perhaps we should introduce a saying that I heard in another news group
(yes I use news to access this mail list) namely "If you are unsatisfied
with the software as it is then I suggest you take it back for a
refund!" ;-)
However in the defense of the others, there are many reasons why, IMHO,
the Open Source attitude of "Fix it yourself" just doesn't work for
many, many people using Open Source software. And the key word there is
"using" in that they are not interested nor perhaps have the time or
knowledge to build/fix/patch Open Source stuff rather they are just
consumers of the end result (The Open Source model loses sight of the
fact that there are people who just want to be consumers - IOW it's not
a commercial model thus is having difficulty being accepted in the
commercial marketplace).
Hell if I had the time (that is enough copious free time - which I
don't) and the knowledge (haven't programmed in C++ in years, nor have I
written Windows applications) then I would take this and fix it myself!
To the "Frequent Patchers/Implementors" here you have yet another
advantage in that some of you already have your heads wrapped around the
various concepts that Cygwin implements (I've looked briefly at the
packaging concept, the bz tar images, setup log, dependencies, etc and
it would take me a while to get the concepts in my head). So you guys
are at a distinct advantage to many of the "Cygwin consumers".
I'm certain that if I took some time I could do it but I don't have the
time to do it. IOW it would take me perhaps months to do because the
added time to get to know all the stuff I'd need to know before actually
coding anything of the fix. Whereas people who have already worked on
setup.exe would not have such start up costs and could implement this in
weeks if not days.
It's amazing to me how people can't see this!
OK, flame away...
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