Re: mods for compiling perl && perl common packages

[Toon Moene <toon at moene dot indiv dot nluug dot nl>]

[ This is absolutely the last thing I'll write about it ]

I wrote:

> > Well, I do not know the situation for students in my country, but  
> > I'm a civil servant for the Dutch Meteorological Institute, and I  
> > got a letter last week that summoned me to write up all my
> > activities outside the 36-hour office week, whether paid or unpaid:

Alisdair said:

> I could see this as being a difficult one to answer; starting with the
> obvious breathing, eating and sleeping, there is the difficult question
> of whether to ask permission to walk up the street to the shop to buy
> bread and a newspaper as opposed to just buying either the bread or the
> newspaper...

And Joe:

>  A common practice used by labor unions when a strike is
>  for some reason impractical is called "work to rule".
>  The idea is that as a protest, workers suddenly start
>  complying with every single safety rule or official
>  procedure on the books, no matter how slow this makes
>  things.  In real life, things only get done because
>  workers apply common sense and disregard some rules.
>
>  So, just get everyone in your department to prepare a
>  massive document containing everything you ever did, in
>  excruciating detail.

You both carefully clipped the two important sentences out of my mail:

"Indicating these activities will be understood as a request for  
permission to keep carrying out these activities"

"_Initially_, you yourself judge whether these activities are a  
barrier for your function in the public office" (emphasis mine)

So, because of the first sentence, I decide not to return the  
questionaire.  Now consider the following scenario:

Next year, on behalf of my employer, I'm issuing an Invitation to  
Tender for the successor of our current computer system for  
operational weather forecasting (a well known "killer micro", not a  
Cray, but the Cray's best friend :-).  This needs a European  
procedure, because the projected purchasing price is ~ Dfl 500,000  
(i.e. ~ $ 250,000).

Surprise, surprise, we get an offer for a (commercially supported)  
Beowulf a la the Avalon (see http://cnls.lanl.gov/avalon), which is  
approximately 8 times as fast as our current system (our code is  
almost perfectly parallel).

So we decide to buy the thing.

Now the above mentioned "killer micro" manufacturer is pissed and  
complains in Brussels about our procedure:  One of the members of  
the selection team at KNMI has ulterior motives to push a solution  
based on free software.  Said manufacturer (or rather - their  
lawyers) point at the regulations for Dutch civil servants I just  
showed and, presto, Toon is out of 1 job and KNMI pays a hefty fine  
or has to buy the lesser performing alternative.

Yeah, bright future :-(

--
Toon Moene (mailto:toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl)
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
Phone: +31 346 214290; Fax: +31 346 214286
g77 Support: mailto:fortran@gnu.org; NWP: http://www.knmi.nl/hirlam