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Re: [PATCH] Remove absolute paths from gpg.rc



On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 04:34:44PM +0000, Dave wrote:
> > And what if users have different wishes?
> 
> I've already explained several times that the user doesn't own the
> system.  The physical user is governed by the owner of the system.
> Therefore, the user's wishes must be compatible with the owner's
> wishes.  (If the owner is a dope, he'll lose users.)

...and users never do things they're not supposed to, and always
follow all the rules, and all of the world's jails are completely
empty, because everyone does what they're supposed to do all the time.

You are living in Fantasyland.  

Your idealisms about the Unix Philosophy and about security simply
don't work in the real world, where typical users are not programmers,
and don't want to spend any more time than they absolutely have to
learning how to use and configure computer software.  Computers are a
tool, and it should be simple and obvious how to use them, for the
average computer user.  This means big, bloated software, that does
all the thinking for the user, because small, facile tools take too
much effort for the average computer user to learn how to use them.
What you don't get is, THIS IS WHAT MOST PEOPLE WANT!  And the LAST
thing any normal computer user wants to think about is keeping their
system secure.  In their view, that is the programmers' and OS
designers' job, not theirs.  That's the simple reality of technology
and the world of system administration.

Until you can get a hold of this idea, and it sinks through into the
parts of your mind that are capable of processing thought logically,
nothing you have to say on this topic has any practical value
whatsoever.  Your philosophy is solely based on an extremely narrow
view of computer users, which most people just simply don't fit into.
Mutt, and indeed very few programs, should target only that segment of
computer users as its audience.  In the majority of cases, there are
not enough of those users to make it worth the effort of developing
tools that way.

Even for users who LIKE this kind of environment, it's not right all
the time.  I myself am a die-hard fan of system administration via
command line.  But when it comes to image processing, which I do a lot
of, I don't want to do this via a couple of dozen command-line
utilities;  I want GIMP.  I want something that shows me in real time
what I'm doing to my image, and allows me to do many different kinds
of operations on the image without having to load the image into
memory every damn time I want to change something, and undo what I
just did if I don't like it.  That model is totally stupid for the
vast majority of image processing tasks.  Not only that, but it is
impossible in most computing environments, unless you explicitly save
backups of every version of your file.  And that makes it utterly
impractical; doing so, and managing the versions, is tedious and
time-consuming in the extreme.  People have much better ways to spend
their time.

Yeah yeah versioning file system blah blah blah.  Not everyone has
access to one, or even knows what it is.  In fact, practically no one
does.  It's not a viable solution for the vast majority of computer
users.

The Unix Philosophy is not the only game in town, and it is
absolutely, positively, unequivocally NOT always the Right Thing.
If you think it is, you're unbelievably narrow minded, and probably
nuts.


> > And what about binary distributions?
> 
> By GPL, they must include source.

Lots of software isn't GPL -- real software that real users want to
use.


-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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