This is a bit of a rant/vent, so skip if you don't want to read that kind of thing.
I've mentioned it a couple times, but I do web development. I primarily create sites using a fairly standard LAMP environment, with Symfony 2 as my framework of choice. It's a pretty solid framework, but, like all things OSS, suffers from gaps in documentation and it feels very fragile. I've spent many hours digging through docs and Stack Overflow trying to figure out why the syntax they tell me to use is producing errors, why config settings are throwing exceptions, that kind of thing. When it works, it works beautifully. When it doesn't, you might as well beat your head against the wall for a few hours because none of the error messages are meaningful enough to point you in the right direction.
So, I updated one of my client's Symfony installations on my dev machine using Composer (it's a PHP package manager... Symfony projects are actually based on a number of smaller packages). Apparently, two entries in my config.yml file which have been valid for years are now wrong. No documentation anywhere (changelog, etc.) to explain why that may be the case. Yay.
The other, larger annoyance is with linux itself. I use Linux Mint as my distro of choice because it's stable and its interface is very Windows-like. It's simple to install and setup on VirtualBox. Because of its stability first mindset, it lags behind in the software it has available to it. As a PHP developer, best practice dictates that you keep your software up-to-date with the latest stable releases for bug fixes, security patches, and new features. And that's where my frustration lies.
There are ways to get the latest stable releases from other repositories and PPAs. Unfortunately, in my case, both Dotdeb and Ondrej Sury's PPA are buggy. It seems like it has something to do with Apache 2.4.10, but in both cases PHP simply doesn't work. I managed to get the latest Ubuntu repository to work, but it gives me PHP 5.5.9, which came out last February and is definitely not the latest stable release in the 5.5 branch. Moreover, I want to use 5.6, but it's not available. I could download and build/compile from the source, but that's not really efficient from an updating POV. It's just a PITA I don't want to have to do every month or so.
So, I'm frustrated. In Windows land, programming software updates come with new versions of Visual Studio and the in-place service pack updates. There's up front cost (although, with the new Community Editions of VS, that's no longer going to be true), but installation and updates is mindless. It just works. And I struggle to think of why that can't be the case with linux, even accounting for differences in distros.
I'm also amazed that the software vendors themselves - Apache, PHP, etc. - don't have their own official repos one can point their package manager to. I mean, I'd love to simply point at something like PHP-5.6-Debian and have it always give me the latest stable release.
I dunno... linux has always felt unnecessarily fiddly and complex to me. It's too simple to screw things up, and things that are messed up don't give much in the way of descriptive language explaining why. I hate having to deal with configuration issues regularly.
Grr....
I've mentioned it a couple times, but I do web development. I primarily create sites using a fairly standard LAMP environment, with Symfony 2 as my framework of choice. It's a pretty solid framework, but, like all things OSS, suffers from gaps in documentation and it feels very fragile. I've spent many hours digging through docs and Stack Overflow trying to figure out why the syntax they tell me to use is producing errors, why config settings are throwing exceptions, that kind of thing. When it works, it works beautifully. When it doesn't, you might as well beat your head against the wall for a few hours because none of the error messages are meaningful enough to point you in the right direction.
So, I updated one of my client's Symfony installations on my dev machine using Composer (it's a PHP package manager... Symfony projects are actually based on a number of smaller packages). Apparently, two entries in my config.yml file which have been valid for years are now wrong. No documentation anywhere (changelog, etc.) to explain why that may be the case. Yay.
The other, larger annoyance is with linux itself. I use Linux Mint as my distro of choice because it's stable and its interface is very Windows-like. It's simple to install and setup on VirtualBox. Because of its stability first mindset, it lags behind in the software it has available to it. As a PHP developer, best practice dictates that you keep your software up-to-date with the latest stable releases for bug fixes, security patches, and new features. And that's where my frustration lies.
There are ways to get the latest stable releases from other repositories and PPAs. Unfortunately, in my case, both Dotdeb and Ondrej Sury's PPA are buggy. It seems like it has something to do with Apache 2.4.10, but in both cases PHP simply doesn't work. I managed to get the latest Ubuntu repository to work, but it gives me PHP 5.5.9, which came out last February and is definitely not the latest stable release in the 5.5 branch. Moreover, I want to use 5.6, but it's not available. I could download and build/compile from the source, but that's not really efficient from an updating POV. It's just a PITA I don't want to have to do every month or so.
So, I'm frustrated. In Windows land, programming software updates come with new versions of Visual Studio and the in-place service pack updates. There's up front cost (although, with the new Community Editions of VS, that's no longer going to be true), but installation and updates is mindless. It just works. And I struggle to think of why that can't be the case with linux, even accounting for differences in distros.
I'm also amazed that the software vendors themselves - Apache, PHP, etc. - don't have their own official repos one can point their package manager to. I mean, I'd love to simply point at something like PHP-5.6-Debian and have it always give me the latest stable release.
I dunno... linux has always felt unnecessarily fiddly and complex to me. It's too simple to screw things up, and things that are messed up don't give much in the way of descriptive language explaining why. I hate having to deal with configuration issues regularly.
Grr....
"I was thirsty for everything, but blood wasn't my style" - Live, "Voodoo Lady"
