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NVIDIA Licence Update (Linux Exception)
(startx) writes "I don't know how long this has been the case, but with the latest NVidia driver update comes a new installation method, which unifies the installation process almong all Linux distributions. Just for kicks I re-read the licence, and it has a new section labeled "2.1.2 Linux Exception" Basically GNU/Linux users are now free to redistribute the driver file. Not only this, but the FAQ section of the README file says you can redistribute in whatever form necessary, stating distributions are welcome to include it as a package as well. Woohoo!"
Gentoo already has nvidia-glx and nvidia-kernel packages as part of Portage.
Doesn't seem to be an April Fool's Day Joke.... yet.
I'm with everyone else who thinks we should check the nvidia website in a few days.
If this isn't a joke, then I certainly applaud nvidia for taking a step in the right direction so you can install Linux on an nforce/nforce2 system and have to muck with driver code patches to get sound/lan/video working right.
And yes, I double checked... the license also applies to the nforce drivers!
Say what you want about nvidia fumbling on the FX cards, ATI still has a long way to go before they have real drivers that work correctly for all their cards under Linux/XFree.
So everyone has to have either sed or perl installed? Different developers will make different choices. If it is done this way, everyone will probably need both, plus awk, plus [insert a bunch of programs here]. In fact this is the current state of most open source project. That is a lot of stuff, especially for those workstations who don't do any development.
Also a lot of programs are starting to use XML (even worse). For config files, it has all the disadvantages of a text file, but also it is not very readable (to a normal person). A little while ago, I was looking at a program, and it required the latest freaky xml library. Why? Because they decided to make the configuration file XML. Nothing else.
Also using perl doesn't solve the problem of being inefficient. If the line you modify changes size, at the very least, you will have to rewrite every bit of data from that line to the end of the file. It may not be a problem if you only need to change one small file, but large or many files will waste the user's time. Many settings are of constant size in binary files, and those which are not, can be dealt with. Indexing and moving stuff around doesn't work with text files, but it can with binary.
Yeah, you'll probably want a library to take care of the binary files, but it's being done for XML, and like you said, perl, sed or some other program is needed for flat text. Something for binary configs would be thousands of times easier to write and would be ten times smaller.
You bring up a good point here. One I didn't really think of. However, it's trivial to put a table of constant strings into a program. It'll miss the unknown paths, but I imagine only tweak monkeys would have such a set up. Just give them instructions I suppose...
Well, I wasn't saying the Windows registry would solve anything, I was giving an example of the bottom of the barrel going in the right direction. Their registry has countless design flaws, the most obvious are they put everything into two huge files. They probably were forced to go this way because all the stupid decisions they made caused text files to be completely unworkable.
Imagine if the registry was one huge text file. "Registry scan rate is now at 10 min per scan" "Blue screen! Blue screen!" "We're going down in flames cap'n." "Pull up! Pull up!" "Damn it Bill! You killed us all! Aaarrggghh!!!" ;-)
As for file locking: Yeah, being able to lock portions of a config wouldn't help installer programs much (assuming you aren't running programs at the same time), and it was a strech for me to mention it. But it would help where config files are used by multiple programs or multiple instances of programs.