Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 18 May 2001 09:34:14 -0600 | From | Charles Cazabon <> | Subject | Re: CML2 design philosophy heads-up |
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Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> wrote: > Arjan van de Ven <arjanv@redhat.com>: > > Aunt Tillie doesn't even know what a kernel is, nor does she want > > to. I think it's fair to assume that people who configure and > > compile their own kernel (as opposed to using the distribution > > supplied ones) know what they are doing. > > I'd like to break these assumptions. Or at the very least see how far > they can be bent. I know this sounds crazy to a lot of hackers, but > I think there's a certain amount of unhelpful elitism and self-puffery > in the "kernels are hard to configure and they *should* be hard to > configure* attitude. Let's give Aunt Tillie a chance to surprise us.
Whether this is desirable or not is debatable. The big question is: why on earth would Aunt Tillie _want_ to compile a kernel at all, let alone re-configure one? If she's using Linux, she's installing her distribution's pre-compiled kernel, and has no need for anything else.
Simplifying the configuration interface so that "anyone" can use it seems like a waste of effort. If there's an interested novice out there who wants to learn how to configure a kernel, they'll be sufficiently interested to invest an hour or two in learning how the whole process works. Make it as simple as it needs to be, and no simpler.
Charles -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Charles Cazabon <linux@discworld.dyndns.org> GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/ Any opinions expressed are just that -- my opinions. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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