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

[Kurt Pfeifle]

Kurt Pfeifle <kpfeifle at danka.de> wrote (Wednesday 26 July 2006 23:13):

> 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 :-)

I just checked the link you provided again. The page names the date
"11 April 2006". That is most definitely *not* the date that story
was first published. IIRC, it was published in February 2004.

The story is really that old  :-)

> 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