You've started it... [LWN.net]

You've started it...

Posted Jan 29, 2012 21:40 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: You've started it... by khim
Parent article: The case for the /usr merge

And my pragmatic approach is to close all bugs where some kind of non-standard configuration is used as INVALID.

Right. So in the end nobody but the developers can use the configuration options provided, because if they use them they can't report bugs or get them fixed. And then those configuration options get removed because they're unused. And then we look around at the non-configurable desert which our free platform has become and wonder when exactly we took this wrong turn.

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You've started it...

Posted Jan 30, 2012 9:56 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Why do you think someone took the wrong turn? Non-configurable desert is one description which tries to imply this is somehow bad. Uniform experience is another description for the same thing - and it's usually praised by reviewers... unless they themselves want to change something - and can not.

I'm not saying all options are worthless (it'll be hypocritical for me to say so since I toggle quite a few knobs on new systems). But they should all earn the right to live. No exceptions. You must compare overhead the developer faces for given option with popularity of said option. If option is wildly popular then it must be supported even if it's quite painful for the developer. If it's trivial and does not require a lot of Q&A resources then it can be kept even if it's not all that popular. But if it's both not popular and painful - then it's better to make it go away.