Politeness and respect when asking favors from people who don't know you, that's arcane rules these days? Wow ...

I'm with the grandparent. People claiming "I was badly treated by an OSS project" without even naming the project are at least as likely to have been the one who were at fault themselves. That also goes for "I was once badly treated by a Wikipedia editor" people.

That makes sense; when I read your first posting praising the quality of proprietary software, my reaction was "that's funny; most proprietary software I've used sucked much worse than the free ones, had lower-quality documentation and everything". Microsoft's flagship products are an exception (although of course they don't do what I need, at least they are coherent and polished).

I haven't used an iPad or Photoshop, but they are also among the very few flagship products which get money and talent thrown at them.

Actually, he doesn't. He's talking about "talent or desire for college".

"Field" as in "database field"? They have no business storing cleartext passwords in a database.

But /etc *is* the central repository for application and kernel settings you're talking about.

(Except the user-specific settings. It's unfortunate that ~/.??* doesn't cover all such settings and nothing *but* such settings. In retrospect it should have been ~/etc/ or something.)

Yes, but it's a reason which often is not valid. I bet I can cover any modern Unix which has gcc and Gnu make with one simple Makefile. (Using the native toolchains, especially the native make, would be significantly harder.) Windows is quite a different thing, and few Unix programmers care about it. There's no decent make there by default anyway.

Clang ... isn't it just another set of $(CC), $(CFLAGS) and $(CPPFLAGS)? Although I admit I'd want a separate "./configure --use-clang" step for that rather than "make USE_CLANG=yes clean all".

I'm starting to suspect you're trolling, but ...

Welcome to my world, where few developers (me included) have any real idea how the product is used, and it's up to test to find out. Then approximate this by designing long-term stability tests etc (fighting the limitations of the in-house environment simulators). Then run and manage these. Then when something happens, answer questions like:

Is this important to a real customer? Is it caused by the product or the test environment? Can I convince others this is a bug? Can I do anything to narrow it down, or help the developer in some other way?

There's also customer problems: a tester is often the most important person when a high-prio bug report comes in, because it's critical to find a way to reproduce the problem. (Several times we've had to hack the product, and the test tools, and the test data, and come up with new techniques to do that. That means very close cooperation between three or four disciplines.)

Overall, there's plenty of challenging work to do, it covers many areas, and you get respected for doing it. And it's work at least as full of surprises as the programming bit.

Mine has looked the same since 1992 or so -- it's what I ran on Solaris at the university.

I still haven't understood what's the big deal with a desktop anyway. You need ways to move your windows around, a way (like a menu) to start your favorite GUI programs, and a way to logout. A way to lock the screen too if you have people around you. A clipboard, but that's built into X11. I can't come up with a lot more useful features, and yet there's all this heat generated by various desktops reinventing themselves and pissing people off.

That's one way of putting it ... Another is: they're making a distribution, for themselves, that they are happy with themselves. What's the problem with that?

(It also happens to be the case that a lot of non-members like me use Debian, but that's as far as I can tell a side issue.)

Except not everyone does. Most machines under my control run Debian stable, because I don't want any trouble from them. I just need them to do their job.

Hard to comment on since you don't say what you find weird. It's easy to think "weird" about anything that deviated from your own favorite Unix.

Actually I don't. Let's assume your software is on average one year old as you use Wheezy. Software kind of worked one year ago too, you know? It's not as if 2013 was a year of great breakthroughs in computing which obsoleted everything done in the 1970--2012 timespan.

And if you feel it was, perhaps you're better off running Debian testing or some other bleeding-edge distribution, and reserve time for dealing with the "bleeding" aspect of "bleeding edge".

Yes. Also, it's demotivating to recognize the "new" stuff as a reformulation of something people tried in the 1990s and then lost interest in. It's demotivating to immediately see the inherent flaws in it.

For me it's also recognizing that we haven't used the *old* tech to its full potential yet. For example, I could spend ten years becoming a much more powerful C or C++ or Unix programmer -- even though I've done it for 15--20 years already.

I've experienced that too. Or more generally: designing some piece of software by myself according to some principles, working on it for a while, and then guy B steps in to help -- but B can only work according to principles *he's* used to. Stress levels rise.

Worse, I've probably been guy B myself many times. When you step into a new code base it *is* hard to get used to the style and the mindset (even writing Unix C code can be done in a surprising number of ways, and it seems everyone chooses his own), and it is hard to focus on what's important (e.g. often I find the most obviously buggy, messy or suboptimal module is one which doesn't actually need fixing).

Good OSes and programs don't. The Debian machine I use today works, for the most part, like the SunOS boxes I used 20 years ago. There are gratituous changes, but they are are limited to some high-profile projects like desktop environments (well, I don't use those), the Gimp and Firefox.

Who told you Usenet is not around? I was there an hour ago. Some groups are still pretty decent.