What next? [Was: Re: LiveCD or No LiveCD?]

[R. Quenett]

on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 7:07 TheOldFellow wrote:

"  provided
"  the educational stuff is retained.

But /what/ educational stuff?  The LFS slogan is your distro - your 
rules but the way the educational stuff in lfs works seems to me to 
more often resemble YOUR education - OUR choices - the way WE insist 
that you address them.

How many people here are learning, in LFS, exactly the same thing, at 
exactly the same level, in exactly the same way?  And why should 
anyone feel good about demanding that anyone else also do exactly 
that?  Each of us is an expert about some things at some level and 
each of us is an absolute ignoramus about other things at other 
levels.  Each of us wants to change some of that both in ourselves 
and in others and each of us is absolutely right and correct in each 
of those things.

Why isn't it YOUR education - YOUR choices - in the way that works 
best for YOU?

How detailed and low level does each of us want to get?  Be able to 
pick apart a makefile, do build configurations better by hand than 
automatically, squash bugs and send brilliant patches upstream?  
There are experts here that routinely do this and much more.  These 
people have my genuine and undying admiration.  Could I learn to do 
that, at least to some degree?  Yes, I could.  Do I want to?  After a 
lot of thought, the answer is no, I don't.  So for actual use, I'm 
doing an actual distro like many who are using lfs.

Even if I did decide to do it and did get good at it, what next?  Am 
I to get even more detailed at it?  Kernel hacking?  A great firewall 
distro like IPcop?  If I go the detailed route, where do I stop?  Not 
before I am capable, in six days or less, of building my own chip fab 
and carving my own ones and zeroes out of wood?  And if I did all of 
this and more successfully, and had a life and made a living and saw 
one or more other people once in a while and was entirely content and 
happy about it too, why should I insist that anyone (nevermind 
everyone:) should do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way?

For me, the answer is that I would like to have systems that I mostly 
understand, that I can tweak more or less successfully in ways that I 
can fix when I break them, that I can understand in considerable 
detail what happened to them when I change them and quickly, 
successfully and with confidence revert to what I had previously and, 
above all, that I can use. I need to decide for me what I need to 
know to be able to do these things and how to learn them.  I find lfs 
an invaluable resource in being able to move in those directions and 
I greatly appreciate any help I get from lfs or these lists or 
elswhere.

I may be wrong, but I'm still going to do my education, as well as my 
distro, my way.

Thanks for reading.

$0.002

R
-- 

Pay your own bills.