Re: sysadmin qualifications (Re: apt-get vs. aptitude)
Le 21.10.2013 19:46, Miles Fidelman a écrit :
berenger.morel@neutralite.org wrote:
That's why some professions have needs for legal stuff. We can not
really compare a doctor with the usual computer scientist, right?
And I said "usual", because most of us do not, and will never
work, on stuff which can kill someone. And when we do, verification
processes are quite important ( I hope, at least! ), unlike for
doctors which have to be careful while they are doing their job,
because they can not try things and then copy/paste on a real human.
Actually, I would make that comparison. A doctor's mistakes kill
one
person at a time. In a lot of situations, mis-behaving software
can
cause 100s, 1000s, maybe 100s of 1000s of lives - airplane crash,
power outage, bug in a piece of medical equiptment (say a class of
pacemakers), flaws in equipment as a result of faulty design
software,
failure in a weapons system, etc. Software failures can also cause
huge financial losses - ranging from spacecraft that go off course
(remember the case a few years ago where someone used meters
instead
of feet, or vice versa in some critical navigational calculation?),
to
outages of stock exchanges (a week or so ago), and so forth.
But doctor's can not take as much time as he would want, and can not
be helped by as many people as us. We can simply open our source code,
and we can be reviewed by lot of pairs.
We can also set-up automated tests, to ensure that we are not doing
stupid things.
Maybe. The thing is, most mission-critical, safety-critical, and
life-critical software is written by commerial firms, and often under
government contract. Between deadline and budget pressure,
proprietary considerations, and sometimes security classification -
Well, I did not meant that most applications are open source. I'm not
even sure that it would be a good thing or not. I have no real opinion
on that point... I'm not really a FOSS zealot, I use opera as browser,
nvidia drivers and flash-player after all. For drivers and flash, I do
not have choice, but for opera, I could use some free web browsers. I
try some of them regularly, but I am never convinced. And I perfectly
remember why I tried opera: it was because it had better support for
standards than firefox, which was my browser at that time. But at first
try, more than standard respect, I liked (and still like) _almost_
everything in opera. So, I do not really mind about FOSS. I simply want
good tools which respects standards.
Plus, it's easy to find open source softwares with dirty designs, too.
So I apologize for my bad choice of words.
the changes are that the stuff that must work best, is NOT being done
as open source or with particular transparency. At best, we can hope
for serious design reviews and testing - not always the case.
Which takes us back to a pretty good case for professional licensing
and review - of the sort applied to doctors, civil engineers,
architects, and so on.
I was, in fact, thinking about that: pair review. With the opportunity
to have more reviews when you build a software than when you heal
someone, since your software will, theoretically, be maintained several
years, while you will heal someone several days only (at least, for
important operations like surgery), and the operations itself won't last
more than few hours.
Imagine what would happen if your baker did not paid enough
attention and used some cleaning liquid instead of water? That could
kill, but I hope they take their job seriously enough. Oh, I said
baker, but it is true for all kind of works. Building houses, creating
cars, etc. Will you compare those to the doctor's job?
Well, there are safety and sanitary codes applied to food preparation
facilities, at least here in the US. Sushi chefs who prepare fugu
(blowfish) are tightly regulated in Japan. Heck, in the US, barbers
are licensed - probably not a bad thing for folks who might literally
hold a knife to one's throat.
Yes, there are controls. Which is normal. But it is not always on the
whole professions. Of course, there are hygienic controls for industries
which are making food, but they are probably less strict than what you
will find in an hospital's kitchen. Because in such kitchen, there will
be meal prepared according to people's health problems, for example
without salt or with controlled quantities of sugar.
I think that it should be the same for softwares: high controls for
critical softwares, but they are not so mandatory for, say, office
suites, drawing softwares, games, most websites you will ever see, etc.
and wade through all the recommended and suggested optional
packages -
That's useless. For a lambda user, he will only install, and never
care about the recommended stuff. The difference here against windows
is, that you can trust the Debian repo to not having malwares
installed with them. Plus, you won't have to enter *any* security key.
Those are a real pain... and are very common on Windows' softwares.
"Lambda user?" What's that?
Sorry, I'm probably too used to use that expression. Lambda is often
used here as a synonym for common, anonymous. So I should have said
average users.
In any case, the major point here is that Windows is a popular
development environment, particularly for commercial software,
because
that's what's on desktops; and it's on desktops because it's easy -
it
comes preinstalled on everything (yes, you can Linux installed on
some
machines, but you have to go searching, and they're probably not the
ones on a typical office desktop).
Yes, the point is that it is sold with lot of stuff pre-installed.
It does not means that things are easy to install on it. I could sold
computers pre-installed with gentoo, but it would not mean that gentoo
is easy to install :)
I think being usually installed and being easy to install are 2 really
different things.
and then, maybe, have to deal with issues around which JRE you have
installed?
I do not know, I never install Java. Are there really lot of issues
with JRE, or is it simply fud?
Well... if you're running open office, you need to have a JRE
installed.
Wrong.
It is only recommended, not needed, because it provides optional
features ( which one, I have no idea ). I know that it works fine,
because I have it installed, and I have no Java stuff here.
I try to keep my system as clean as possible, and it means that I avoid
installing Java, Qt, python, etc softwares (not because those
technologies are bad, simply because I prefer to have as few libraries
as possible, which in turns allows my systems to be more responsive even
on very old computers with less than 256MiB or RAM) and I successfully
use libre/open office without Java. And without having any difficulty to
install it.
Here is the quote:
"Java is required for complete OpenOffice (OpenOffice.org)
functionality. Java is mainly required for the HSQLDB database engine
(used by our database product Base) and to make use of accessibility and
assistive technologies. "
Notice the "complete", "require for the HSQLDB" etc. Most features does
not need it. And I think that less than 15% of any office suite needs
complete feature products (and I'm gentle, I would like to say less than
5%).
As to issues, yes - some things run just fine on various JREs, others
are particularly finnicky about running on the Sun/Oracle platform.
Re. open office, the release notes say:
<snip>
Ok... what is an average user to make of that?
Well, ok, so, let's install the same software on both systems.
On Debian, just search in your preferred package manager openoffice and
let the system install it with all it's dependencies. You do not even
have to know that there is a website (and sometimes I would like to find
the original website and can not...), the distribution will take care of
everything for you, except if you want to play with your system as I
(and probably lot of people on that ml). But I want to play. If I do not
want, I do not play. Removal of software is quite easy, since the system
says itself why things are installed: if it is you, you know that you
can remove things without problem. If it is automatically installed, you
know that you do not want to remove it (except for advanced users, of
course).
On windows, you have to install OpenOffice.org, read the stuff, install
Java. Oh, wait, I think the windows installer includes it (did not
checked). So you will still not need that paragraph.
But you only will have downloaded it, being from Internet or from an
portable source (CD, DVD, external drive...). You still have to run the
installer, or I should probably say the auto-extractible archive to be
exact (most "installers" on windows are not real installers. Real
installers are the msi files... not the exe ones), read the license
(theoretically) to accept it, then, next many times, finish. And it will
spawn the Java installer. Read license, accept it again, "next" many
times, again, and finally the last finish.
Here, if you are an advanced user, you will require various
manipulations to change what you installed, in a dirty "software center"
or whatever they call it, try to find things, and hope you will break
nothing when you will remove the parts. AVERAGE USERS ARE AFRAID TO
REMOVE SOFTWARES ON WINDOWS !!!! I have seen it so many times... and I
can understand them. You do not know why something is installed. It is
installed, that's all. You want to remove it? It might break
everything... or nothing. Who knows? Nobody.
It's easy to install things on Windows? Really? Windows makes softwares
installation/removal easy? That must be a joke.
Just for reference, I use a Mac and mostly commercial software for
office kinds of stuff
Never used any mac, can't judge. I do not really intend to buy one
anyway, they are far too expensive for what they do, and more closed
than windows. Do not fit my needs, in short.
Heck no. Macs are basically BSD unix underneath, and they support
multiple virtual environments. I run all KINDS of stuff on my
MacBook
- native Mac applications, native BSD applications, Windows and Linux
code in virtual machines - pretty much the most flexible platform
around.
Really? Well, I've heard that it was hard to customize the system. I
never had the chance to verify that, and I do not intend to spend lot of
€ for that, so I have to rely on what I read here and there. I guess
it's better since they switched to x86 architectures, now you might add
hardware not made by apple in it?
I will
note, that for a lot of server-side stuff (particularly my mail
processing and list manager) I find I get much better results (and
newer code) by compiling from source, than by using the package
system.
Maybe you should take a look at gentoo, then. If you use official
repos of softwares, use an OS made to compile every softwares you
have. I think I'll take time to install it one day, when I'll finally
be successful in understanding how to compile an efficient kernel. Not
tomorrow...
Tried it. Too much trouble, and too slow. On Debian, I load the
binaries of all the standard stuff, then build trickier stuff from
source. Also, I kind of question the gentoo approach - why package
source code in the gentoo ports library, instead of pulling a tarball
from upstream and ./configure; make install.
I do not know. It seems that their system allows to control
dependencies on the whole system.
For example, if you do not want dbus, you can add a system-wide option
to say, do not compile anything with dbus support. Some years ago
(something like 10) I known a guy which was using it for servers, he
seemed pleased with it. I have no idea if he still use it.
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