Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-crg.llnl.gov!casey
From: casey@lll-crg.llnl.gov (Casey Leedom)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: All that stupid contrib stuff
Message-ID: <16591@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 13 Jan 89 21:17:57 GMT
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: casey@lll-crg.llnl.gov (Casey Leedom)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lines: 58

| From: Isaac <salzman@rand.org>
| 
| > I'll reiterate my suggestion here: it is my firm recommendation that
| > the X Window System project reject out of hand any contributed software
| > that doesn't have an Imakefile and compile relatively trivially on at
| > least *some* system.
| 
| I am not one to *flame* anti-social net behavior, but I feel compelled to
| do so this time.  First off, you're flaming the X Consortium and those that
| contributed the software for not being able to just type "make" and have
| everything work.

  I'm sorry, it certainly wasn't intended as a flame.  I have
complemented the X Consortium several times on the quality of their
software engineering.  I believe that I complemented them in the message
quoted as a matter of fact.  In any case, I'm sorry if you took it as a
flame.

|   The X Consortium is not obligated in any way shape or form to even
| distribute the contributed software, and the people that created it are
| not obligated to make it available to the rest of us. What would you
| prefer, having software that takes a little extra time and effort to
| build, or not having it at all?  I think the gains out weigh the losses
| by a wide margin.

  I'd have to say I'd prefer not to have the software.  Bad software is
worse than no software in my mind.  It wastes my time trying to install
it and it wastes everyone's time trying to use it.

  The general quality of the Free Software that's available is not good.
And the terrible thing about it is that most of the faults are trivial
things that should be one of the first things dealt with (installation
configuration, targetting, and documentation as well as general
documentation).  I would dearly like to see this situation change.

  No, the X Consortium is not bound to distribute any contributed
software.  And I think they should use that freedom to save themselves
and everyone else's time by refusing to bundle badly set up software.
They have done an incredible job with regard to their own software
engineering efforts and have provided the tools for others to do as well
with their contributions.

| Secondly, you yourself are doing exactly what you're accusing other people
| of doing, poorly distributing software (or patches in this case). Each one
| in a separate message, some are just the contents of an Imakefile not even
| in shar format, some are context diffs, some are shar files.
| 
| Lastly, there is a Newsgroup for the sole purpose of distributing X
| sources: comp.sources.x.

  You're right and I'm sorry.  I mentioned in the message that you quoted
that I didn't feel the effort was worth it in the end.  I probably should
have stuck with my original decision not to post any of my contrib fixes.
On the other hand, I think that having the messages each apply only to a
single application was a good idea.  You can use your mailer to delete or
keep messages as they apply to packages you're interested in.

Casey