Bridges, and Code is King [LWN.net]

Bridges, and Code is King

Posted Apr 22, 2008 21:39 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Fedora goes to a community-dominated board by nix
Parent article: Fedora goes to a community-dominated board

That depends? Is a steel bridge nearly iron ? Clearly rust and fool's gold which are both
very high in iron aren't suitable for making a good bridge. On the other hand stone and wood
are both quite low in iron ordinarily, and have made reliable, and sometimes very pretty
bridges for hundreds of years.

Also, its 2008 and Unicode has been available on Linux systems for a long while now, time to
stop abusing obsolete fixed pitch typefaces and pretending that U+0060 and U+0027 are the pair
of (English) facing quote marks you're looking for, try these two instead.

But seriously, Code is King, so long as Red Hat's employees do the majority of the work (which
they do) then Red Hat controls Fedora, no matter who votes for what in which meeting.
Wrestling control away from Red Hat, only to have the project sink without trace, would not be
a success story for the "Fedora community" whatever that is. (Is it me? I use Fedora and file
some bugs, and sometimes I suggest small patches? Plus some of my software is in Fedora?)

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Bridges, and Code is King

Posted Apr 22, 2008 22:07 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

That depends? Is a steel bridge “nearly iron” ?

Super-RH, Distro of Steel!

Clearly rust and fool's gold which are both very high in iron aren't suitable for making a good bridge. On the other hand stone and wood are both quite low in iron ordinarily, and have made reliable, and sometimes very pretty bridges for hundreds of years.

So it's like irony, then? (Sorry.)

Also, its 2008 and Unicode has been available on Linux systems for a long while now, time to stop abusing obsolete fixed pitch typefaces and pretending that U+0060 and U+0027 are the pair of (English) facing quote marks you're looking for, try ‘these two’ instead.

I don't have a keyboard that generates those (does anyone?) so typing them in is much too annoying. No software I have access to replaces normal quote marks with those, and even if they did I defy them to do it reliably in the presence of nested quotation marks and apostrophes (TeX did it, but only by translating ` ' into real quotation marks). Plus, to add insult to injury, hey look identical in most of my system's Unicode fonts unless you blow them up to 20-point plus.

Thanks, but no thanks. Way too many downsides. (I know that the backquote is the wrong shape in most modern fonts: perhaps just using ' or " consistently would be preferable.)