On Mon, 2007-05-21 at 07:38 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote: > Tim wrote: > > On Sun, 2007-05-20 at 20:51 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote: > >> Suppose you were building a machine that more than one programmer > >> would use, along with typical office stuff... What would you include > >> to keep them from wasting hours of time or calling you in the middle > >> of the night to install something they need. > > > > I would think any programmer that required outside help to install stuff > > that ordinary semi-competent users can manage to install without outside > > help is a hopelessly incompetent person to have as a programmer. > > I take it you don't understand the concept of multiuser machines where > users don't have the root password. You know - the environment unix was > designed for... > In addition, some of us work on a number of operating systems. In some cases, it can be a real issue as to what to install, where to install it, and how to run it for best results (as in transportable to the next system or OS version). After mastering CP/M, DOS, Win 3.1, Win 98, Unix, RTOS, and Solaris something or other, I threw in the towel on learning how to manage and maintain the OS, and program it as well. After that I worked on 6 more OS's (I think), and didn't need to learn how to install and setup all the goodies to make it work. Of course I have been doing this stuff for nearly 35 years, and my programs run from databases, to spreadsheets, to C and C++ (kindof) to CLISP, Pilot, Pascal (including writing my own compiler), Basic, including writing my own interpreter, program generators, program translators, application program translators from one system and hardware to another for Integrated Circuit testing, DSP, AI, and 3d graphics. Somewhere my brain just got too overloaded to deal with the ins and outs of OS's, all of which really only do a few things, namely supply files to hardware or get files from hardware. Everything else is just implementation. Why is it deemed important that I know how to install application xyz on OS flavor of the month? Especially with things like Microsoft, where the OS is more like flavor of 10 years ago. Here in Linux land, some unix standards are ignored or being modified to suit some feature I am not necessarily aware of and may or not be essential to the operation of the OS. However I am not in anyway capable of knowing all OS's, or all standards for a particular OS, and that is where things like RPM come in handy, assuming they are well done enough to put the software where it belongs, and set the proper permissions. No programmer necessarily needs to know the OS. In fact that is part of what OO programing is all about, bury the stuff that is not essential so you can concentrate on the job at hand. Regards, Les H
