> I'll sand off the attribution so the lampooned party can pretend he
> didn't really write something like this:

I sha'n't pretend.  I wrote it, though admittedly it does land a little
shy of what I now think I really meant.

>>>> [...keep out the point-and-drool crowd...]
>>> [...also keeps out busy people of clue...]
>> I'm not sure what to suggest here; we (or at least I :-) really want
>> something that minimizes effort for the latter while maximizing
>> effort for the former.
> This is simply braindamaged.  What else should NetBSD make
> pointlessly difficult to keep out those UNWORTHY to run it?

True enough.  What I really want is not so much keeping The Rest Of
Them from running NetBSD as the twofold goal of (a) keeping them from
spamming the lists with questions answered in README files or moral
equivalent thereof and (b) not letting their presence drive the
directions NetBSD evolves in (I already find the i386 install bordering
on offensively user-obsequious).  Driving them away completely is just
one of the possible ways of achieving those goals.

> Computers are supposed to be tools for getting useful work done.

Computers are often toys as well as tools; for some <person,machine>
pairs, they are toys _instead of_ tools.  (I have not followed this
line of thought very far; it may end up being irrelevant to the issue
at hand.)

> I simply cannot see the act of compiling a large software package as
> useful work under any circumstanced (OK, outside of testing a C
> compiler).  At best it is a precursor to using that software package
> to get useful work done;

...for a suitable definition of "useful work".  If your raison d'etre
is system support, then from your point of view it is useful work in
itself.

> when it is a *necessary* precursor, it is almost invariably because
> the package is sloppily designed for configurability.  When it is an
> unnecessary precursor, compiling it yourself is almost always a
> pointless waste of time.

Religious views ("binary-only is evil!") aside, I am not going to run
any software on my machine that was not built from source by someone I
trust (usually me) and, if remote, communicated by a channel whose
level of integrity protection I trust.  Precompiled binaries fall flat
on their faces by this criterion.  It takes time to vet sources; it
takes a hell of a lot more time to vet precompiled binaries, more than
enough to make up for the time it takes to build my own binaries.  And
it takes a lot more time than either to clean up after a breakin due to
running untrusted software.  The only binaries I don't have source to
on my machine are the ROMs on the CPU board!

> The more precompiled binaries I can get my hands on, the more spare
> time I have for ...

... cleaning up after someone slips you a trojaned something-or-other
and waltzes through the resulting hole, leaving muddy footprints all
over your system.

Or at least that's the way I look at it.  Things like active attacks on
binaries downloaded from FTP servers aren't a serious problem yet.  I
have zero faith that they will continue not being a serious problem.
One of the |<3vv1 WaR3z |)o0dZ will eventually find or write a program
for doing such active attacks, and I'm not interested in being one of
the sites that gets hit when that happens; that's why I'm so careful.

					der Mouse

			       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
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