[OT] Debian mailinglists [was: RE: Debian or Ubuntu?]

[Avi Greenbury]

On Wed, 21 May 2008 11:04:05 -0300
Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:

> Avi Greenbury wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, 20 May 2008 14:59:57 -0300
> > Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
> > 
> > If you GUI tool exists to stop the user making stupid mistakes, and
> > actually managed it, I would have been unable to do that.
> > Had it not stopped me making what, in general, are stupid mistakes, it
> > hardly seems better than a text file.
> 
> Do you actually intentionally make "stupid" mistakes that can never possibly
> work? That's what a config tool should prevent.  When a config value needs
> to be a domain name, it may be desirable to permit domains that can't
> currently be resolved, but it's never going to desirable to allow you to
> enter a domain that could never be registered.

It depends on your interpretation of 'stupid' and 'never', I suppose.
What kind of domain that could never be registered, and that no-one
will ever want in their configuration, do you have in mind?

> 
> >> Idiots _never_ stop being idiots.  You surely know the saying: "The
> >> difference between ignorance and stupidity is that the former is curable"
> >> (Twain, I think).
> > 
> > The exact wording (and opinion on the meaning of 'idiot') is immaterial.
> 
> It's material, because there are many idiots that get put in the position of
> having to maintain servers, and many of them will _not_ learn.  If they
> can't learn, they should at least be prevented from screwing up the
> servers.

As I meant to infer in the above, replace where I said 'idiot' with
'ignorant person'.
If you have, as you say, an idiot who can not and will not learn, and
they should be prevented from screwing up the servers, the easiest way
to accomplish that is to not let them anywhere near them, and let
someone who has learnt do the configuration.
If they cannot and will not learn, surely they're as likely to make
perfectly legal configuration errors as they are syntactical ones?

-- 
Avi Greenbury