At 12:28 PM 4/27/00 -0600, Tim Uckun wrote:

>
>I am in the process of recompiling php-RC1 for the umpteenth time
>(testing). I guess the people in the Unix world are pretty used to
>compiling just about everything they get. The NT crowd does seem to be a
>little intimidated by the process. I usually also make a modification to
>postgres source (to get longer object names) before I compile it.
>
>

<rant>

Which is part of the reason that Windows users out number Unix
users by about a hundred to one (at least). Given that Unix had
a good decade lead on the Windows platform, you have to admit
that perhaps Gates did something right, or Unix did something
very, very, wrong.

I gave up on Unix five or six years ago when the Unix community
was unable to master the concept of "shared library" (Sun was
able to implement them without understanding them, which was
quite an accomplishment). VMS managed to figure them out
by V3 and Gates got them right after one false start on OS/2 V1.

Source distributions are deplorable for anything other than
development. No human being (as opposed to developers) should
ever have to deal with source code. Source code is gook just
like the tax code. Some of us warped geeks get off on it, but
for people just trying to get on with their lives... Please!

There is no point in implementing good stuff like dynamic libraries,
civilized threads, and 64 bit arithmetic (ahem!) if we can't take
advantage of them. They exist. Let's use them to make our lives
better.

</rant>

Jim Starkey