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making unix easy unix sucks unix is too hard ssh

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From: Tony Lawrence <tony@aplawrence.com>
Subject: Re: How on earth, was Re: New OpenSSH packages available (3.1p1)

Brian K. White wrote:

> Tony Lawrence <tony@aplawrence.com> wrote in message news:<3C937DA5.9020107@aplawrence.com>...


>>
>>BTW, that's yet another example of the kind of thing that frustrates 
>>people.  Somebody goes searching for OSR5 ssh binaries and gets a 
>>pointer to your ftp site.  Great! Here it is, all ready to go.. but they 
>>can't do a thing with it because they don't have Bzip.
>>
> 
> - forward: This is not personally directed at you Tony, I'm just
> putting forth an emphatically different point of view on this topic. -
> 
> oh wahhh  :)
> 
> I have no patience for people who think the guy doing the real work is
> obligated to also practically install and configure it on their
> machine for them too.


Not the point.


As someone providing a service to someone else, you aren't OBLIGATED 
to do anything,and the operating phrase is "you don't look a gift horse 
in the mouth".


However: obviously you have REASONS for sharing whatever it is you 
shared.  Sometimes those reasons are completely altruistic, but more 
commonly there is some self-directed motivation that is at least part of 
it: you perhaps hope to gain some degree of award, financial, fame, 
whatever.

In the case of sharing binaries like this, your altruistic motives might 
include easing the pain of Unix for those new to it, and your other 
motives might include being seen as a person who can do such things, 
which might bring you income later, recognition from your peers now, etc.

Given that you have at least one or more of those motives, why on earth 
would you want to screw it up by making it difficult?

You say:

> finally.... who installs ssh on sco boxes anyway? people who need or
> expect to keep using their system in it's stock installed state? no,
> those people are using telnet and rlogin. if you are replacing telnet
> with ssh, then I say it is not unreasonable to expect you to at least
> be comfortable with also replacing compress with bzip2. Otherwise, you
> are hardly fit to be installing and configuring ssh in the first
> place, *especially* on sco which is not one of the environments it is
> most commonly used on, developed on, and thus, supported on.


Someone might very well want ssh JUST so they can ssh out to somewhere 
else.  That's what I use it for on the SCO box here- I have no need to 
run sshd, but when I'm doing SCO work it is convenient to be able to use 
ssh to go out.  There's no configuration, so it's not a case where 
anyone needs to know anything more than getting the ssh binary.


So-again- why make it difficult?  If your motives were to ease
the pain of Unix, you sure haven't helped that at all.  If
you wanted recognition, well, you probably got that, but you
also probably got annoyance along with it, and
annoyance tends to cancel out the recognition, doesn't it?

IMHO, this has been one of the many problems that have kept Unix pushed 
down: this geek mentality that demands a test of manhood in exchange 
for anything it gives freely.



-- 
Tony Lawrence
SCO/Linux Support Tips, How-To's, Tests and more: 

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