Computers, right? Load of old bollocks, that. (Part 37: GNU)

[hirez]

I think we (where 'we' parses as 'anyone with more than one Unix box who's wanted a document printed without the aid of several Knuth books') can get behind the idea that CUPS 1.1.x is a good thing, if one that travels with rather more baggage that might be considered strictly appropriate for a free software product.

1.2.x is... Prettier and comes with bells and a steam-driven whistle. Installation is Jolly Nice on some package-damaged platform like Beardian, since you don't notice the myriad GNU libraries that it drags behind itself on lengths of string like the tins and bodies that follow the bride & groom's car.

It's probably rather messy on a real OS and won't install at all on the boggle-eyed humppa-freak version. ("Get that GNU shit off my machine. We want beer and humppa and then we hunt furries!")

On an OS that runs on proper hardware (Admittedly it's nasty SysV filth) it's a complete nightmare and I'm going to wallop the next -funroll-loops ricer I see on general principles.

Later:
openssl genrsa 1024 > host.key
openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -sha1 -days 365 -key host.key > host.cert

Of course that'll blow up in a year, but it's much less work.

Comments

[reddragdiva]

I was unaware until it was mentioned last night on an irc channel for embittered sysadmins that CUPS is commercial freeware, i.e. GPL but you're supposed to buy support. Worst of both worlds!

[steer.livejournal.com]

I only found it out recently. It's quite weird... I approve of the idea myself. People who can work it get it free and those who can't must pay. Think of it as taxing incompetence.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Think of it as taxing incompetence.
Possibly. Or think of it is a way to guarantee that people need the support, by building in something specious. And "it doesn't matter if it's buggy, or a swine to install, because we offer support" ...

[steer.livejournal.com]

Ah... but since there are SO many confusing unix printing systems if you build a confusing one which is non-free people can switch to one of the many confusing free onese.

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Ah. Never fear - when I start trying to play with UNIX, you know who I'll be asking ... [grin]

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

Quite. Reminds me of a recent conversation.

Me: This tool you wrote doesn't work.
Some programmer: You've got the source, why don't you fix it yourself?
Me: In fact, why don't I just rewrite it from scratch, which will be quicker than understanding the gibberish you call code, in which case we don't need you anymore, don't let the door hit your arse on the way out.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

[FX: Applause]

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

Nicely put. And also why properly commenting code is a good thing ...

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I'd vaguely get behind that if the build instructions came with a dependancy list. As it is, bugs and patches seem to vanish from the official forums and I've been working out what's missing/broken in my HP-UX build by grovelling through the source and reverse-engineering a working Beardian install.

I suggest that a less clued and bloody-minded admin would be buggered.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Dependencies:

http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/cupsys

any help?

Also, if you have a working debian system you can use apt-file to find what package missing files belong to.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Of course you then have to work out what all those other bits depend on.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Quite. Beardian packages are kitchen-sink affairs. Though I suppose any binary package more or less has to be.

In this case, the failure appears to be that unless you have GNU TLS installed, the cups rig won't auto-generate self-signed certificates to make the SSL connections work. You can disable SSL, but it doesn't fall back gracefully. Installing GNU TLS on a non-GNU system requires (f***ing bunzip2 to unpack the archive. Jayzus!) openCDK, which requires GNUcrypt, which requires libgpg-error, which requires libintl, which is part of GNU gettext, which requires libiconv...

And lo these were the generations of Abraham. Or however the 'begat' bits of the Old Testament go.

[steer.livejournal.com]

*cackles wildly* Oh yes -- TLS is a bugger in any case -- I've a good few hours of life I'd like back spent trying to get the sod to work on Redhat (which has a brief period in the sun as "almost supported" linux here at York).

[hirez.livejournal.com]

The Really Annoying Thing is that all the functionality they need is in OpenSSL anyway. It seems to me that they're dependant on two different TLS libraries because they're too f-ing incompetent to borrow a bit of makefile. This will be my next move if the tottering pile of libraries I've built on the one machine doesn't work when installed on the target box.

[reddragdiva]

Jesus H. Goatfucking Christ. "Viral licence" must be what the programmers are taking by requiring all this guff. I suspect the goal is to have "GNU/" prepended to the name of every vaguely unixlike operating system on the planet.

[gaius-octavian.livejournal.com]

Yes but that's circular isn't it, in order to end up with a working system you must start with a working system... :-P

[steer.livejournal.com]

(Grin) Well, that's sort of a fair point -- but if he were using a Debian system the whole lot would have installed from binary anyway -- the problem is that he's not using a Debian system.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

No, I work in an environment where 'cross platform' means more than 'Redhat and Gentoo'.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Eek... Gentoo has been shown to cause self-harming in lab-rats. It appeals to the mentality that will willingly spend five hours tinkering to get the cd command to respond a micro-second faster.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Some months ago, I burned off about a half-dozen varying Linux distros in order to find one that would work with some slightly old HP x86 kit.

They were all shite, but Gentoo was by far and away the most horrible one of the set.

FreeBSD worked best, obv.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I've never got on with BSD I'm afraid. It's the different command line switches...

The last time I even tried to install gentoo I wrote over my main data partition with an ext2 partition. Oh, and it required you to have a working network connection before you started. Nasty. It's probably better since then but I still distrust it.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

It's allowed.

Though since I started on Solaris, learned a bit of Linux 1.x, went for a different job that was in a BSD-only shop, worked for two Solaris/Linux places and then ended up (so far) in a HP-UX/Linux environment with a collection of personal BSD machines, most of the while keeping a BSD box at home... I shall look upon that as a bit of a poor excuse.

[steer.livejournal.com]

My first Unix was Irix which I now realise is sick but I liked then. Irix was horrible in many ways not to mention the fact that I had to make the horrible transitions from 4->5->6 which were all ghastly upgrades. I followed this with Redhat Linux which I liked at the time but now realise the shortcomings of (but god it was better than Irix) and Solaris (7/2.7/5.7/whatever?) which I hated with an unbelievable passion and still do. Moved eventually to Debian for servers and Ubuntu for desktops.

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

They were all shite, but Gentoo was by far and away the most horrible one of the set.

Yes, but it does come with a nice way of getting Finnish-Imitation-kernal at version 2.6.17, which supports those horrible Broadcom wifi cards.

Kernal panics as soon as you boot it, of course, but it's a nice thought.

[reddragdiva]

My webhost has two principals - an admin and a programmer. The programmer is a 17yo ricer who seriously wanted to run the service on Gentoo. Fucksake.

[steer.livejournal.com]

There's an inevitablilty to this process as the software development process matures.

It used to be the case that I could download some C source with a reasonable hope of porting it to something non standard (e.g. VMS in my particular case).

However, currently the chain of dependencies will be fairly long for the typical bit of software because the development process now is to find the particular tool that does 95% of what is necessary and write some glue code to get it all working.

This is great for me because I use Ubuntu and it means that software to do more or less anything can be installed by typing about eight words (four or five to do the search for it and three more to install).

If you're on something non standard though you're knackered.

Problem is that you have a real dichotomy. Either you drag in a bunch of standard packages to do obvious things OR you reinvent the wheel for the thousandth time and the user ends up with two hundred separate bits of code doing the same task (probably containing four hundred separate bugs).

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I have no particular problem with progress. As long as it is progress, rather than second-systeming, cycle of reincarnation or any other mythical man-month malarkey.

Subversion, for instance, has a dependancy list as long as several arms. Helpfully enough, they package all those dependancies in the distribution and have arranged things such that you'll get the bits you're missing compiled as part of the overall build process.

... I think the problem is that the CUPS mob arse-u-me a GNU environment. 'Make install' doesn't work for that very reason.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Yes... I used to get maddened by such things I must admit. Then, I'm still primitive enough to write my Makefiles by hand.

[countb.livejournal.com]

It's part of OS X, you don't get a much nicer installation than that.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

I believe the only ideologically-sound approach is to decry hard copy as hopelessly 20th-century. And then copy out what you need long-hand onto a postit.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I recently posted in HTML to Usenet.

...by hand-entering the tags (well-formed and valid, natch), poking the [rant] button and then wondering why it didn't look right on screen. Didn't even register just how dumb a thing I was doing.

(it's after 2am - go to bed)

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

I'm sure any worthy readers would have read your comment, internalised the formatting correctly, and never skipped a beat. And if they didn't, we should call them slackers.