Re: GnuTLS for W32

[chad <yandros@gmail.com>]

On Jan 5, 2012, at 12:30 PM, Juanma Barranquero wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 17:19, chad <yandros@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Out of curiosity, do you assemble the pieces of your operating system by hand
> 
> No, because I'm not offered that alternative in the system I use.
> 
>> and manually check for updates yourself?
> 
> I disable automatic checking and do manual checks every now and then, yes.

When you do manual checks, do you run a program that checks for updates, downloads them, and then installs them; or do you load up a web browser, visit some project pages from memory/bookmarks/etc, and start downloading and unpacking zip files?

I certainly don't think that everyone should be *required* to run an automatic critical-update-checker, but we're not talking about that - we're talking about the default setting.  That might involve you being asked a question once ever (something that's been built into emacs at least since I started using in in the 18.43 days), or adding a tiny bit of elisp to your set-up before being asked.

>> Do you think that most GNU/Linux distributions are too much like `software as a service' for the same reasons?
> 
> Certainly I don't like much the way GNU/Linux distributions are going.

Ok, I sympathize (I tend to disable auto-updaters on windows systems myself), but wasn't the question. I assume that you mention SoaS because you think that such systems are opposed to the FSF's and/or GNU project's goals, not just because you don't like them.

You asked, ``if your vote counts'', and - to me, at least - your vote definitely counts.  I'm trying to understand your reasoning for objecting to a default setting that would notify the user about critical issues.  Either I'm not understanding what you're saying, or you're saying that the default users shouldn't have a feature that many (I'd say `vast majority', but `many' is enough) because it might cause you to have to type `n' a few times, and that doesn't match what I expect from seeing your efforts on emacs-devel.

>> If you believe that the default user is opposed to this, I'll suggest that you might not have noticed them all voting with their feet in favor of this at least a decade ago.  This isn't even the old `Windows Majority', even - I can't think of a computing system today that meets the criteria ``might run Emacs 24.2'' and ``does NOT somehow check the network for critical updates in the default installation''.
> 
> There are plenty of applications, many of them quite new, with no automatic checking and/or upgrading.

I don't want to start a flame-war, but I really don't think this statement is true of user software.  Basically everything not hand-hacked on modern GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows system has an automatic checking (or checking and upgrading) system in place, built in to the application (web browsers, office suites, document/imaging systems, and games, for example) or the operating system.  To my knowledge, emacs is the *only* software I use under windows that doesn't do this, but I don't use windows very often, and mostly just for playing certain computer games. Can you suggest a few `user' applications that don't?

Perhaps this is a matter of nomenclature, but in my opinion, if the operating system's default-run package manager performs such a function, I believe that it counts.  Is that's the distinction you're drawing?

*Chad