Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Passing on unwanted groups
Message-ID: <1990Aug24.165603.3503@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Aug21.161506.21784@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Aug22.151531.29862@caen.engin.umich.edu> <1990Aug22.224100.5660@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Aug24.020520.19928@pegasus.com>
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 90 16:56:03 GMT

In article <1990Aug24.020520.19928@pegasus.com> richard@pegasus.com (Richard Foulk) writes:
>But the "not invented here" attitude.  And the "let's make a statement
>while we're at it" approach is stifling things.

The opposite of "not invented here" is "no quality control here".  We're
happy to accept ideas from others -- many of the changes made since the
official release have been suggestions from outside, and some have been
code from outside -- but we are not going to adopt everything anybody
suggests.

>Our favorite OS is better than yours...

???  Apart from Unix in general, we have no favorite OS.

> We hate patchlevels so we'll dream up something of our own...

We still don't care for patch numbering, but would probably have thought
harder about it if we'd appreciated how many patches there would end up
being.  We'd hoped for rather fewer.

>Bnews is so awful that we won't even keep a copy online to look at...

We do have one online, actually.  In fact, we have several online.  (You
didn't think there was just one B News, did you?  Some of the places
where people complain about us "not being B News compatible" are places
where we are compatible with B2.10.1 and think the changes made in B2.11
are mistakes.)

>We can't use Configure, we didn't invent that either.

We didn't use Configure because (a) our early experiences with it were
bad enough to turn us off it completely, (b) most of its automatic features
do little for us (very few of the C News "build" questions could be
answered automatically) and they interfere badly with things like cross-
compilation, and (c) it is too complex for our simple minds.
-- 
Committees do harm merely by existing. | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                       -Freeman Dyson  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry