Red Hat's response to my system-config-samba rhel6 issue

[david-8uUts6sDVDvs2Lz0fTdYFQ at public.gmane.org (David Kramer)]

On 12/09/2010 02:01 PM, Derek Martin wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 06, 2010 at 06:55:59AM -0800, Jim Gasek wrote:
>> Related to the two big trends?:
>> - upstart (changing of the start/stop paradigm)
>> - NetworkManager (phasing out of traditional networking).
>>
>> I dislike both trends.
> 
> This rings of "change is bad..." -- a mantra espoused by an engineer I
> onced worked with.  Change can indeed be bad, but only when it is
> pointless or produces negative results.  In both cases, these changes
> effect a change for the better.  

I disagree.  They're poorly documented, and hard to replace for those
who don't want software that "knows what they want, or should want even
if you don't".

> The Network Manager change allows network configuration to be a lot
> more flexible; granted that's most useful on a laptop, but there are
> lots of laptops.  As others have pointed out, it in no way prevents a
> static IP configuration.
> 
> The move away from the traditional init allows for booting the system
> to be faster and more flexible.

In what way?  How is it more flexible to remove runlevels and a
straightforward easy to manage set of directories and replace them with
more black boxes?  And there isn't even one replacement.  Some services
start up with the init.d scripts.  Some start up with the "service"
command (and bitch at you if you try to run them directly).  Some start
up with the "start" command.  So do I try them in random order til I
find out which one is required to run the service I want to start?

Where's the added flexibility that warrants this pain?

> I'd agree with anyone who said that Unix/Linux got a lot of stuff
> right / does a lot of things better than other OSes do... but that
> doesn't mean there is no room for improvement. =8^)

I'm seeing the trend go the way of "replace the old stuff that works and
was well-understood with the undocumented alpha-grade solutions" a-la
pulseaudio (which is finally better documented and getting more
reliable).  Even the image viewer I use (gqview) was replaced by some
other one with a symlink to the name, that proudly announces that it is
from an alpha release when launched.

This is also coupled with a UI that tries (as configured out of the box)
to even tell you what the hell program you're running!  Many menu
options and panel/widgets just tell you what they do, with no indication
of what the program name is or package they rode in on, so you could
even find out information on them, turn them on or off, etc.