Don't fuck with my expectations
Posted by Erik Peterson on 01/15/2008 02:09

My hard drive died as part of some kind of karmic clusterfuck, and right before it hit the Cobain barrier I was trying out git. Now that I'm back on my feet I wanted to download and recompile the source of git again so that I could continue my geekery. There's this thing I like to do when downloading/compiling something: I get the URL for the tarball and:

wget {whatever} && tar -xzf {whatever} && cd {whatever} && ./configure && make && sudo make install

That way, the thing can download and compile while I don't have to tend to the whole process one step at a time. I can go back to coding or whatever I was doing.

Much to my chagrin, OS X doesn't come with wget. What the fuck? wget has to be one of the most fundamental programs in existence- it is completely nonsensical to keep it out of a distribution that is Unix-based. Sure, it has curl, but curl has more flags than Jimmy Carter has liver spots. I'll be god damned if I'm going to remember all of those when I just want to download a fucking file.

Anyways, the point of this is that I went to get wget by going to the site, copying the url of the source, going to the terminal and typing in

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/wget-1.10.1.tar.gz && tar -xzf wget-1.10.1.tar.gz && cd wget-1.10.1 && ./configure && make && sudo make install

Needless to say, I about had a fucking conniption fit.

The point here being: don't fuck with your user's expectations. Especially the ones that are hard-wired into their brains so extensively that when they try to get around the expectation failure, they fail again.

Way to make your users feel like tards, Apple.