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That's completely in the opposite direction of the post. The post argues against forcing users to maintain a fork of the configuration files. You are arguing to
by jraph 3y ago
That's completely in the opposite direction of the post. The post argues against forcing users to maintain a fork of the configuration files. You are arguing to help users maintain their own forks of the entire program, basically.
While I'm interested in being able to fork the programs I use, and most likely upstreaming the changes, I'm not interested in having to do so to configure them. Configuration files are not stupid and are there for a reason.
- klez 3y agoI'm assuming you're unfamiliar with suckless[0], which GP wasn't using as an adjective, but as the name of a project. There's a philosophy behind that decision, which you (and, in part, I) can disagree with. But they do have their reasons to prefer avoiding configuration files. [0] http://suckless.org/ http://suckless.org/
- jraph 3y agoI am familiar with suckless, but that's useful to mention it explicitly for those here who aren't. Of course I childishly played with the name (but that's their fault picking this name :-)). And of course one can disagree. I like their goal of minimalism and simplicity. I disagree that developer's simplicity should be at the expense of the user's convenience. Computers are already incredibly complex things, and are here to automate things and ease our lives as users. Hopefully a program is written once and used many times, so usage should be optimized, even if it makes the developer's lives a bit harder (I would say interesting :-)). Making software lean and lightweight is part of it (and that's where I agree with suckless), we owe this to our users instead of forcing them to experience slowness and to upgrade their hardware often. Of course that's my view. (I'm a dev)