Packaging a proprietary Python library for multiple OSs

[Roy Smith]

On Thursday, December 5, 2013 11:20:41 AM UTC-5, Chris Angelico wrote:

> No, it's not like that. It's that there are some people who, despite
> truckloads of evidence to the contrary, still think that Google Groups
> > is worth using. Rusi is one of them. Fortunately, he has defended his
> > position by making his posts not look like the ridiculous junk that GG
> > creates by default, but that doesn't make GG a good product.

I use GG on occasion (I'm using it now), when I don't have access to a better newsreader.  Like Rusi, I take the effort to clean up the double-space mess GG produces by default.  That doesn't mean GG isn't a piece of crap; it is.  That fact that I, and Rusi, know enough, and take the effort, to overcome its shortcomings doesn't change that.

I put GG it in the category of "attractive nuisance".  It's like leaving cans of spray paint laying around school playgrounds and then being surprised when the kids pick them up and use them to paint graffiti.  It certainly violates Google's "do no harm" motto when it interacts with usenet groups.

I keep hearing that I should use gmane as a superior interface.  Well, I tried that.  I went to http://dir.gmane.org/search.php, where it asks me to search for a newsgroup.  I type in "comp.lang.python", and it tells me, "No matching groups".  So, that seems pretty broken to me.

> It's like an argument my boss and I had: I said that PHP is a bad language, and
> he said that it can't possibly be a bad language because he's able to
> write good code in it.

PHP is a disaster of a language.  But, like any bad tool, a good craftsman can produce a quality product with it.  Wikipedia is written in PHP.  So, apparently, is gmane :-)  As much as I loathe working with PHP, I have to admit that if you can build a product like Wikipedia on it, it must have some redeeming qualities.