[alt.fan.pratchett] Re: [I] Apostate?
Henriette Kress
From: Aquarion <aqua...@aquarionics.com>
Newsgroups: alt.fan.pratchett
Skipity do, Skipity da, a letter from Raihan Kibria came in from
afar...
>Platypus wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>> > He's around, but not been posting much -- I think he got one of those
>> > much vaunted 'life' things I keep hearing about....
>> <snip>
>> A life? I've heard about those. Aren't they still in Beta testing?
>> Personally I think I'll wait for something more stable, somewhere around
>> Life 3.2.
>
>I recommend you try GNU Life, the open source life. It's free, and fully
>customizable. A far cry from all those expensive, one-size-fits-all
>proprietary lives! On the down side it has a steeper learning curve and
>can be exasperatingly complicated sometimes, but you'll also be much
>safer from total system failures.
The GNU version is flawed in execution. There was there a code-fork
only a few months into development (into the "Male" and "Female"
versions), which has led to wildly conflicting versions. The two
systems are almost incompatible, and getting them to interface and
produce child-processes is beyond many geeks, although there is
limited experience of non-computing bodies having a better (although
in some cases *worse*) success rate.
In addition to this, each version accepts a wildly different
configuration system, unreadable by any other process, and sometimes
not even analyzable by the process itself.
Also, the documentation for any version of GNU Life is nonexistent,
and there is an almost total absence of cases in which GNU Life has
been configured to work as expected/desires. This has led to a
singular lack of any kind of HOWTO type document, except those
produced by unqualified third parties.
In addition, the Male version has a hard-coded feature leading to a
"grep" of all available Female versions for absence of wrap-around
packaging. Should the grep return candidates, the Male version appears
to monitor the other process to the exclusion of all other inputs.
Female processes returned by the Male's grep command appear to be in
able to communicate even with other process's of the same version,
occasionally resulting in an attempted "kill -9" by the process
attempting to be piped to.
In conclusion[1], I recommend a redevelopment and reanalysis of GNU
life, and it's removal from the package pool until the versions can me
merged, or a better protocol for communication programmed.
Yours in total sincerity,
Aquarion
[ . . . ]
[1] Because Rule One when digging a hole deeper than you are tall is
to Stop Digging.
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