I surrender

[Auke Kok]

w9ya at arrl.net wrote:

>Hey gang;
>
>WARNING: this is a rant of sorts. (You have been forewarned.)
>  
>

Hi bob, gang,

>I think Richard's email reflects two things:
>
>His mentioning bugs of this nature means the devels/package maintainers
>are not taking due care and/or due-diligence in crafting their wares and
>leaving these kinds of hunt and find chores to the user.
>  
>

I'm actually surprised about the positivity of your "rant" and when read 
correctly, IMO you basically express the idea that lunar definately has 
problems with more complex tasks. That's true, and there are reasons for 
that as well.

Lunar was never meant as "the easiest distro" or "the best desktop" 
or... etc. One of the main goals is and always has been to provide a 
"stable" set of packages as much as possible. This is obviously a very 
'unclear' objective and may lead people to have expectations which will 
never be fullfilled by lunar. For others it will though.

I think the biggest thing people forget is that lunar is not for sissies 
(sorry for the wording, no offense) and also not for people who aren't 
willing to dig into it a bit. Most of the developers working on lunar 
would shrug at most of the errors we see and fix it manually for 
instance, just because it's obvious to them.

This is mostly where the gap between lunar users and developers lies. 
Implementing and foreseeing all of these quirks is a time-intensive task 
and honestly we are short on developers, and time (even I am).

>You may disagree with my assessment, which is fine, but nonetheless it
>means Lunar is definitely *not* a "working desktop distro" if the user
>has to go through fixing these things in order to maintain a working
>desktop at his place of employment. <- Which is also fine, as long as
>everyone is honest about this state of affair.
>
>In case anyone wants to disagree based on *my* experience in these
>matters, please do everyone a favor and just go into some corner and
>scream;
>
That's not fair Bob, there could be millions of people screaming at you 
right now ;^)

However, feedback is a good thing. Even if the topic is "I give up" it 
might be valuable feedback (as did rpyne's email if read closely) that 
may help others in the future.

Lets just try to stay constructive. =^)

sofar






> as I maintain about 60 some odd packages for two distros, one of
>which is very main-stream and the other more developmental, and both are
>very similar in concept to Lunar. I have been doing this kind of work
>for many years as well.
>
>I consider maintaining packages to be a learned art form and that the
>results for the end user as the ultimate test of how well I am doing.
>
>
>Very best regards;
>
>Bob Finch
>
>
>
>  
>
>>Hey!
>>
>>The problem with KDE is most likely due to wrong permission on the
>>directory /tmp/.ICE-unix, make sure the owner:group is root:root (at
>>least for the second time you tried when it restart at
>>"initializing peripheral"). After that try logging in again and I'm
>>sure
>> it will work.
>>
>>The behavior of .ICE-unix was changed with XOrg 6.8.2 messing it all
>>up.
>>
>>Sincerely
>>Stefan Wold
>>
>>On Fri, 29 Apr 2005, Richard Pyne wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>I give up! Tomorrow I'm going to start looking for another
>>>distro to try on my laptop, probably Mandrake or Redhat. I have been
>>>using Lunar on my servers since the 1.2 iso came out, and
>>>will continue using for my server, but for a desktop with X,
>>>well....
>>>
>>>Two months ago, my employer presented me with a brand new Dell
>>>Inspiron 6000 laptop. Having a 60 Gig drive, I was elated that
>>>there would be enough space to make it multi-boot so I could use
>>>Linux for everything other than the few things that gave me no
>>>choice.
>>>
>>>So, I grabbed a copy of Partition Magic and shrunk the NTFS
>>>partition down to 10 Gig and grabbed the CD of my favorite Linux
>>>distro - Lunar. Things went quite well through the basic install even
>>>thought there were some minor glitches getting the NIC to
>>>work. Even the switch to the 2.6 kernel and patching it for mppe-
>>>mppc went relatively smooth. All was well, I had a good base
>>>system, complete with drivers for both the wireless (using
>>>ndiswrapper), the hardwire networking, and even successfully
>>>connecting to the office PPTP tunnel.
>>>
>>>I decided to get a KDE desktop up. Not too bad, a few hangups
>>>with dependencies and some struggles getting it configured for
>>>my oddball 1280 x 800 wide screen video. Things seemed to be
>>>working fine.
>>>
>>>Then the problems started, the new KDE update came out in
>>>moonbase. The lunar upgrade took most of a night to upgrade, but then
>>>I could no longer log in under KDE. As soon as I would try, X would
>>>crash and restart. The log said something about an
>>>authentication error. After fighting with it for a few days, I
>>>ended up with X (Xorg) working, but only with a default desktop, not
>>>KDE. After trying to re-lin KDE hoping that it would solve
>>>the problem, I still could not get KDE to start.
>>>
>>>Well, after two weeks of frustration, I decided to take drastic steps
>>>and wipe out the Linux install and start fresh.
>>>
>>>Installing KDE after gettng the base OS back on went fairly
>>>well, even though there were a couple of missing dependencies.
>>>Everything went well until I rebooted to level 5 and tried to
>>>log in with KDE. Actually, the login worked alright, but about
>>>half way through the "initializing peripheral" part, KDE and/or X
>>>crashed, restarted and presented me with a login screen again. Not a
>>>hint of what went wrong showed up in any of the logs.
>>>After re-linning most of KDE with no improvement, I decided to
>>>try installing gnome2, after all, gnome is a good workable
>>>desktop. That was five days ago. Again, there were missing
>>>dependencies and modules that couldn't download. Tonight's
>>>frustration comes from the compile of cairo (required by firefox
>>>which is required by gnome2) It fails with:
>>>
>>>gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I. -I.. -I. -I/usr/X11R6/include
>>>-I/usr/include/libpng12 -I/usr/include/freetype2 -Wall
>>>-Wpointer-arith -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes
>>>-Wmissing-declarations -Wnested-externs -fno-strict-aliasing -O2
>>>-mcpu=pentium4
>>>-march=pentium4 -mmmx -msse -msse2 -mfpmath=sse,387 -MT
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.lo -MD -MP -MF .deps/cairo_glitz_surface.Tpo -c
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c  -fPIC -DPIC -o .libs/cairo_glitz_surface.o
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function `_cairo_glitz_surface_get_image':
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:122: error: structure has no member named
>>>`red_size' cairo_glitz_surface.c:125: error: structure has no member
>>>named `alpha_size' cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function
>>>`_glitz_operator':
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:310: error: `GLITZ_OPERATOR_SATURATE'
>>>undeclared (first use in this function) cairo_glitz_surface.c:310:
>>>error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:310: error: for each function it appears in.)
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function `_glitz_surface_create_solid':
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:325: warning: implicit declaration of function
>>>`glitz_surface_find_similar_standard_format'
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:325: warning: assignment makes pointer from
>>>integer without a cast cairo_glitz_surface.c:329: warning: implicit
>>>declaration of function `glitz_surface_create_similar'
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:329: warning: assignment makes pointer from
>>>integer without a cast cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function
>>>`_cairo_glitz_surface_create_similar': cairo_glitz_surface.c:354:
>>>error: structure has no member named `read'
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:355: error: `GLITZ_FORMAT_READ_OFFSCREEN_MASK'
>>>undeclared (first use in this function) cairo_glitz_surface.c:358:
>>>error: structure has no member named `draw'
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:359: error:
>>>`GLITZ_FEATURE_OFFSCREEN_MULTISAMPLE_MASK' undeclared (first use in
>>>this function) cairo_glitz_surface.c:360: error: structure has no
>>>member named `multisample' cairo_glitz_surface.c:360: error:
>>>structure has no member named `multisample'
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:361: error:
>>>`GLITZ_FORMAT_MULTISAMPLE_SAMPLES_MASK' undeclared (first use in this
>>>function) cairo_glitz_surface.c:364: error: structure has no member
>>>named `draw' cairo_glitz_surface.c:366: error:
>>>`GLITZ_FORMAT_DRAW_OFFSCREEN_MASK' undeclared (first use in this
>>>function) cairo_glitz_surface.c:371: error: structure has no member
>>>named `alpha_size' cairo_glitz_surface.c:375: error: structure has no
>>>member named `red_size' cairo_glitz_surface.c:380: error: structure
>>>has no member named `alpha_size' cairo_glitz_surface.c:380: error:
>>>structure has no member named `red_size' cairo_glitz_surface.c:387:
>>>warning: implicit declaration of function
>>>`glitz_surface_find_similar_format' cairo_glitz_surface.c:387:
>>>warning: assignment makes pointer from integer without a cast
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:391: warning: assignment makes pointer from
>>>integer without a cast cairo_glitz_surface.c:397: warning: assignment
>>>makes pointer from integer without a cast cairo_glitz_surface.c: In
>>>function `_glitz_composite':
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:457: warning: passing arg 4 of
>>>`glitz_set_geometry' from incompatible pointer type
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:457: error: too many arguments to function
>>>`glitz_set_geometry' cairo_glitz_surface.c:468: error: too many
>>>arguments to function `glitz_set_geometry' cairo_glitz_surface.c: In
>>>function `_cairo_glitz_surface_fill_rectangles':
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:558: error: union has no member named `mode'
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:558: error: `GLITZ_GEOMETRY_MODE_DIRECT'
>>>undeclared (first use in this function) cairo_glitz_surface.c:559:
>>>error: union has no member named `edge_hint'
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:559: error: `GLITZ_GEOMETRY_EDGE_HINT_SHARP'
>>>undeclared (first use in this function) cairo_glitz_surface.c:560:
>>>error: union has no member named `primitive'
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:560: error: `GLITZ_GEOMETRY_PRIMITIVE_QUADS'
>>>undeclared (first use in this function) cairo_glitz_surface.c:561:
>>>error: union has no member named `type' cairo_glitz_surface.c:562:
>>>error: union has no member named `first' cairo_glitz_surface.c:563:
>>>error: union has no member named `count' cairo_glitz_surface.c: In
>>>function `_cairo_glitz_surface_composite_trapezoids':
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:645: error: union has no member named `mode'
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:645: error: `GLITZ_GEOMETRY_MODE_DIRECT'
>>>undeclared (first use in this function) cairo_glitz_surface.c:646:
>>>error: union has no member named `edge_hint'
>>>cairo_glitz_surface.c:646: error:
>>>`GLITZ_GEOMETRY_EDGE_HINT_GOOD_SMOOTH' undeclared (first use in this
>>>function) cairo_glitz_surface.c:647: error: union has no member named
>>>`primitive' cairo_glitz_surface.c:647: error:
>>>`GLITZ_GEOMETRY_PRIMITIVE_QUADS' undeclared (first use in this
>>>function) cairo_glitz_surface.c:648: error: union has no member named
>>>`type' cairo_glitz_surface.c:649: error: union has no member named
>>>`first' cairo_glitz_surface.c:650: error: union has no member named
>>>`count' cairo_glitz_surface.c: In function
>>>`cairo_glitz_surface_create': cairo_glitz_surface.c:922: warning:
>>>implicit declaration of function `glitz_surface_get_features'
>>>make[2]: *** [cairo_glitz_surface.lo] Error 1
>>>make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/cairo-0.2.0/src'
>>>make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
>>>make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/cairo-0.2.0'
>>>make: *** [all] Error 2
>>>++ Mark Compile stop   : "cairo" "0.2.0" "Fri Apr 29 05:01:35 UTC
>>>2005"
>>>
>>>
>>>--Richard
>>>
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>Lunar mailing list
>>>Lunar at lunar-linux.org
>>>http://foo-projects.org/mailman/listinfo/lunar
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Lunar mailing list
>>Lunar at lunar-linux.org
>>http://foo-projects.org/mailman/listinfo/lunar
>>    
>>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Lunar mailing list
>Lunar at lunar-linux.org
>http://foo-projects.org/mailman/listinfo/lunar
>
>  
>