Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Janis Papanagnou Newsgroups: comp.unix.programmer Subject: Re: Open Source does not mean easily re-compile-able Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2024 19:27:07 +0100 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 49 Message-ID: References: <86wmflc83k.fsf@example.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2024 19:27:09 +0100 (CET) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="e2d2614da03247a1749c0f02c277a58d"; logging-data="498632"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX188MK9rSZg8KdRIdFBXpCbA" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/45.8.0 Cancel-Lock: sha1:nzJsEPB67avnvZTN/j45QdpcWus= In-Reply-To: X-Enigmail-Draft-Status: N1110 Bytes: 3142 On 28.12.2024 00:56, Kalevi Kolttonen wrote: > Janis Papanagnou wrote: >> On 28.12.2024 00:22, Kalevi Kolttonen wrote: >>>> [...] >>> >>> No need to be skeptical, we live in modern ages >>> where things have been made quite convenient for us. >> >> LOL. :-) > > My comment above was a reference to the bad old > days when you had to manually download tar.gz packages > and compile them to satisfy dependencies. Now the > builds are super easy with the help of package management. I see; you were referring to the way the technical process works. Personally I don't think that package managers contribute a lot since for ordinary users it's the same whether the package managers install a binary package or a source that is compiled under the hood. The difference is that source package needs a development environment (compiler, etc.) that "ordinary users" might not have installed or may not want to get installed (just for that). > >>> Compiling Thunderbird should be very easy indeed >>> when we use Linux distro's package management. >> >> You expect _users_ of tools to use a _development_ >> environment to fix *inherent* shortcomings of a tool? >> (Shortcomings that should not be there in the first >> place!) > > Why would you think so? This is just one way to > solve the problem. [...] For a specific type of users. - The description you gave was describing a development process; that's not something that ordinary users would typically do (or want to do). Your problem solving suggestion goes even farther with yet more inherent issues that users of package managers might not like (editing sources, bypassing standard installation of regular updates with an own [temporary] version/branch). Janis