On Sun, Nov 29, 1998 at 02:22:54AM -0500, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> > Then you are saying that any non-English-language user cannot reasonably
> > use Debian by default.
> Thanks for noticing.
Hard not to.
> > A large portion of using any 'nix, part of the culture, is defined in four
> > letters. RTFM. Like it or not, the predominant language of TFM is
> > English. I don't think it is reasonable to set defaults based on
> > ignorance, no matter what the reason.
> That part of the Unix culture is pretty silly, IMHO. Yes, the manual is a
> wonderful thing, total flexibility is king, and so on. But intelligent
> defaults don't hurt power users in any way.
Agreed. What, exactly, are "intelligent" defaults, however, is what is
in dispute.
> To restate that: since you have already RTFM, you would have no problem
> taking -asis back out of your joerc, and passing an option to 'less' to make
> it escape high-ascii characters again.
But if I did not? Now remember why less defaults the way it does? To
prevent problems with the display. So now take it further. Have someone
who is having problems with the display and doesn't know how to change it
because they haven't (or are unable) to RTFM.
> I think defaults should be chosen based on what, statistically, gives the
> most useful results most often.
That would be what they are.
> Well, all good DOS comm programs have been 8-bit clean since the 1980's.
DOS, in case you haven't noticed, is dead. ;)
--
Steve C. Lamb | Opinions expressed by me are not my
http://www.calweb.com/~morpheus | employer's. They hired me for my
ICQ: 5107343 | skills and labor, not my opinions!
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