[cups.general] Interesting link....perhaps a bit provocative ;-)

[Kurt Pfeifle]

wtautz <wtautz at cs.uwaterloo.ca> wrote (Wednesday 26 July 2006 22:10):

> http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
> 
> interesting read ;-)


Hey, that's a a really, really, really old story :-)

At the time I really appreciated Mike for his ability to respond in 
such a friendly and positive manner (and I still do it now).

Because what ESR picked as the prime for his rant (Mike + the CUPS 
developers), should in fact have hit the Redhat packagers much more.
But they did escape without a single scarf :-)   

ESR in fact was ranting about Redhat and mainly had the problems he
described because his distro never offered him a CUPS config tool 
or a default out-of-the-box config file as is shipped by CUPS, but 
instead their horribly broken (at the time) printer-config tool (or 
whatever its name is).

What made my own CUPS-friendly blood boil at the time was that ESR
himself is the highly praised author of some patronizing writings 
such as "How to ask Questions the Smart Way" [1] and then IMNSHO 
being enough of a smartass to not follow his own advice... (I hope 
Mike can at least silently grin for himself when I say things he'd 
never say personally himself, not even in private).

ESR of course still had a point, but he used a really wrong way to
put it. And of course, if he had meanwhile swapped some of his IPO 
shares that once made him rich [2] for Redhat ones (warning: I'm 
merely speculating here, I have no evidence at all :), his 
motivation to criticize Redhat was much lower -- so, to make a big 
PR splash, it was OK to rather go for the much weaker CUPS 
developers...   ;->>

The more serious thing about that topic is, that I see a very, very
similar scenario with the Ubuntu fork of CUPS. They've badly b0rken
a few well working CUPS standard features --- but for their users
it looks like "CUPS is a piece of cr/\p"...   I'd not wonder at all
if one nice day another ESR-like "CUPS horror" piece would show up
on Slashdot or elsewhere, this time with somebody trying to get
his CUPS network at home work on Ubuntu...

Cheers,
Kurt

 [1] http://catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
 [2] http://lwn.net/1999/1216/a/esr-rich.html