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/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 23 2001 - 21:00:28 EST