November 10, 2006

Rant

Crappy Piece Of Crap Of The Day

Today's crappy piece of crap is beagle-build-index, which has so far spent five and a half hours indexing the documentation on my new Fedora Core 6 install.

It's not the only thing that runs for ages after a fresh install, either.

Feh.

If I wanted Gentoo, I'd have downloaded Gentoo.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:15 PM | Comments (184) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 rpm -e beagle is the only way. And by the way, I told you before that "install everything" is retarded, and yet you have the temerity to complain about the consequences of it. You, and only you installed that crap, and now you do not even have the excuse of "Install Everything" button.

Actually, I take it back -- for the case of beagle specifically. Beagle is going to be in the core for a long time [unless Microsoft kills it, see below], so you have to deselect it specifically every time you install. If you recall, Fedora always shipped with file indexing enabled. The only difference that it was locate back in RHL 7 days, and slocate in FC1. I asked around why the heck this nonsense is going on and the definitive answer is, "because notting likes it that way".

Beagle comes from Ximian as a showcase of the power of Mono (together with Tomboy and other such crap like f-spot). It is supposed to be a phenomenal improvement over slocate, and should finally be doing its indexing "in the background", without killing your system. Guess what, not only it doesn't deliver, but it is worse than slocate. But you should welcome your new Mono overlords, or else you're "divisive", "NIH man", "paranoid".

Speaking of paranoid, you heard about the $328 million deal between Microsoft and Novell (who owns Ximian (who wrote Mono (in which Beagle is written)))? Can you spell P-A-T-E-N-T-S? Maybe we only need to endure Beagle for two or three more Fedora releases.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 11, 2006 05:04 AM (9imyF)

2 Install everything used to work just fine, back in the days of RH7-8-9, and even in the early Fedora releases. Back then, they didn't dump elephants into the mix without thinking about whether people wanted elephants.

Sigh.

Thanks for your answers, by the way. Very much appreciated.

The evil beagle is off on a second round. Last night it had accumulated 12+ hours of CPU. This morning it's around 5 hours.

Yuck.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at November 11, 2006 10:29 AM (PiXy!)

3 I'll tell you even more. Beagle was developed specifically as a response to *rumours* about new Microsoft database-driven filesystem. You know what kind of Microsoft fanboys work in Novell/Ximian. Of course they had to copy the idea.

Beagle even looks good at PowerPoint presentations. The idea is, you never remember any file names, just drop everything into the bottomless maw and then say, "hey computer, what about that picture where I passed out drunk in Stacy's vomit... No, not Tummy's vomit, search again!" That's how F-spot is supposed to work. It's kinda like Google and "never delete anything" system.

Obviously, some people have this urge to be total revolutionaries, to discard the current paradigm. Filenames are so 20th century.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 11, 2006 01:13 PM (9imyF)

4 I don't mind that paradigm so much.

What I do mind is really really bad implementations thereof.

It's spent 20 hours (CPU time) indexing 800MB of docs. On a 2.6GHz P4. Given the high-quality high-performance open-source full-text indexing applications that are readily available, that's ludicrous.

Oh, and my install process died. Couldn't download one of the files, so yumex didn't install anything at all. And lost the list of packages I wanted. And took ten minutes to reload itself. Gah.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at November 11, 2006 01:24 PM (PiXy!)

5 I seriously suggest you to suffer with yum in FC-6 and hope that Jeremy fixes Pirut for FC-7. After all, RHN has to migrate off up2date to yum-based backends, so it's budgeted to a degree. Yumex is likely to be a dead end. Also, if you filed specific bugs against Pirut, it would help.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at November 11, 2006 03:27 PM (9imyF)

6 Yeah, actually filing bug reports would be a step up from whining.

I did use yumex to disembeagle my install, which both amused me and made things run a lot faster.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at November 11, 2006 06:06 PM (PiXy!)

7 Well written bug reports are generally effective ... I used to alpha test utilities for a living ... you can blame me for bugs left in the old IBM DOS 6.3 toolset.

Just note what you did, what you expected, and what actually happened.

Don't tear the heads off the programmers ... they are the ones reading the report and deciding what to do about it.

End with a request to consider fixing the problem in a future release if they cannot correct the problem now ... often bad program behavior is a result programmers getting painted into a corner by someone else's earlier bad decisions.

Bugs generally fall into three categories:
1) "Fix it now"
2) "Fix it later"
3) "We meant to do that"

Enough complaints about a bug can get it moved up a notch towards "Fix it now".



Posted by: Kristopher at November 13, 2006 06:17 AM (kuCLH)

8 Pixy, look at "Install Everything" discussion for Fedora 7
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-January/msg00345.html

As I gather, it might be possible, althogh you'd need a stack of CDs sky high now with former Extras on the same media; also someone has to work on fixing conflicting packages and proper selections for alternatives. It can be done, but needs work.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at January 06, 2007 11:29 AM (9imyF)

9 Thanks Pete.

Unfortunately, a lot of the posters seem to be missing the point.

Yes, I can do a yum-install afterwards - if it works. Even if it works, that's a very time-consuming and bandwidth-hungry process. And I've already got the media. (And based on experience, the chances of it working are about one in twenty.)

Putting Extras into the main distribution certainly complicates matters, because as you say, Extras isn't necessarily free of conflicts.

And I think Core+Extras will fit on a single DVD, though probably not with all the source packages as well.

This guy gets it, anyway. I don't intend to do this on a production box - ever - but it's enormously useful to me in a development/support role to have everything already installed.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at January 06, 2007 11:53 AM (PiXy!)

10 I thought yum could install from DVD, including the '*'. This is of the things that the unified back-end between yum and Anaconda allows to do. I understand that it's still not quite what you want. For one thing, it lacks integration into Anaconda's GUI. But it should be less painful than pulling from common repositories at least.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at January 06, 2007 04:37 PM (9imyF)

11 Ah. Well, yes, that would certainly help.

I still want to see the "everything" option back in place, though. CentOS 4.4 has it, even if it's a smaller "everything".

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