On 10/28/2015 12:39 AM, David Christensen wrote:
On 10/27/2015 06:10 PM, David Christensen wrote:You are free to study the source code and help the OP solve his problem.Sorry -- that sounds harsh. I say "study the source code" because the source code is the canonical definition of what is actually going on. If I can understand the source code, I can decode the bits and bytes in memory and on disk (e.g. data structures) and understand what operations are performed on them (e.g. algorithms). The few times I have done this, I learned details that were not in the man pages. I suspect that solving the OP's problem may require such knowledge. David
I am not a programmer. (I am also not a user of Debian, but I do keep a watch here to see what might be going on in the other popular distros.) So I feel it is reasonable to put this out to the readers of this list: What percentage of Debian users does anyone reading this believe to be able to read the source code (if they even know where to look to find it) and then to modify it to suit their needs? Surely Linux was a programmer's wonderland when it came out in 1995, but it is now a system which even grandmothers are using. I would not ever suggest that it become closed source--as I suspect one or two distros may be on the way to--but it should be realized that its original wonderfulness is lost on the majority of modern-day users. --doug