Re: LYNX-DEV On the feasibility of booting pure BSD and other stuff

[Scott McGee (Personal)]

I tire of the attempt to impose political motivations and ways of thinking
on computer programming. For a few, perhaps yes, it is a matter of politics.
Most of us do what we know how. We attempt to learn new things and apply the
best of what we learn. Unfortunately for the politically bent, most of us are
at varying degrees of knowledge and experience on different subjects. Thus,
we tend to use different approaches for the same thing.

A realist, which, I beleive, most of the Lynx Dev people (at least the active
ones) are, will realize this, and take it into account. Some people will
have intimate knowledge of their system, and need little or no assitance to
build Lynx. Others will be mere users on systems they barely understand, and
often grossly incapable of matching the intracacies of a program like Lynx to
the abilities of their system. Most will be somewhere in between. All may want
to, and should be enabled to build Lynx with relative ease. Sure, the first
group could possibly devise better compiler options and command line switches
to create a more optimum compilation, but often, they have real work to do,
and can't take the time. The latter certainly can't build Lynx without our
help.

Being realists, and keeping the above in mind, it behoves us to provide the
most general mechanism possible to allow the greatest number to build Lynx.
In the past, that meant multiple targets in the makefile. In the developtment
code, it is starting to mean using autoconfig to expand the set of systems
and users that will be able to build Lynx. It has nothing to do with politics
(real or psuedo), nor philosophies such as proposed by one relatively new
member or the list, but with the realities of the current state of computing.

If a law was passed requiring all computers to have a certain, closely 
regulated set of characteristics, we would all be stuck with MS-DOS 1.0.
No thanks! Diversity can be a pain, but has real advantages too. Politics
matters not at all!

Scott


Scott McGee: Salt Lake Community College Webmaster | When in danger,
___________________________________________________| or in doubt,
Email: address@hidden (Scott McGee)         | run in circles,
Web:   http://www.slcc.edu/infotech/webmaster.html | scream and shout.
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