Riding on this, perhaps now evident, wild hair I’ve gotten to go back to writing things online, I decided that I would go ahead and install locally an online photo album. (I’m uninterested in using sites like Flickr or SmugMug because it means giving my content to someone else, at least for them to take care of if not for me to yield ownership of. That’s the same reason that this replaces my prior use of Livejournal.) The de facto standard for this sort of thing is Gallery, which comes with some warts, but overall does what I want with an acceptable level of idiocy (see also: Wordpress), and it does actually have a module to provide RSS feeds, which is important to me for /var/log/gr. (That RSS thing is what pushed me back to Gallery from Mr. Fitzpatrick et al’s PicPix, along with the largely unmaintained state of the latter.)
Because I really can’t be bothered to manually maintain software packages any more (doing this shit for a living has beaten that impulse right the fuck out of me), especially not one that depends on so many things as Gallery2 does (think ImageMagick; it just snowballs from there), I opted to use the version in FreeBSD’s ports collection, where there are certainly some missed version level dependencies, but after periodic attention over a couple of days I managed to get the thing to build and install. Then, as I have with Wordpress, I picked up the pristine installed files and dropped them in a separate directory to actually present them (so that later updates through ports don’t bitch about modified files and I can just roll the package updates and then update the live site carefully)… and the thing went boom.
This brings us to the Gallery forums, specifically this post by yours truly. You’ll note that I took the time to research the common causes for the problem that I was having, determine that none of them applied to my situation, and provide all of the relevant information that they recommend for people requesting help on their forums.
What did I receive in response? A true open source classic: “Your production application’s functionality is our playground.” Not quite in those words and with a touch of s, our, their,, but still. I quote here from the passing response I gave this horse shit attitude there:
The stance you describe[, "I doubt there are many people who have a lot of experience debugging the install, and most of those are the core developers who have now moved wholesale to G3 development,"] is pretty distressing, considering that 2.3 is still the shipping version of the software and this forum does exist with the explicit assertion that it is [the] canonical location to look for assistance installing and configuring Gallery2.
What the fuck is wrong with these people? It’s likely that some of them are smarter than I am, and they’re certainly better at doing what they do than I am, but I assert that, if they aren’t interested or don’t have the time to provide assistance with the software they’ve produced, then they shouldn’t tell me that I should go to this specific place to ask questions about it!
Yes, I figured the problem out for myself. Yes, I explained how to fix it in the same forum, which most posters there apparently don’t realize might be useful. To channel Dave Lowery, I hate my generation.
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