Thanks for the nice "because it appears that you don't even know whats going on." You can be sure I KNOW WHATS GOING ON!!!!
I hate to have to say this, but if you do actually know what is going on, you should be ashamed to admit it. I have to believe that you honestly do think you know what is going on, but I will suggest that somebody had better take a MUCH closer look at the quality of the products that are being distributed by YUM (including YUM itself). If I had performed like that, when I was working, I would have been fired.
When I read such comments I really wonder why I invest sooooooooooooo much time in porting any software for free.
I know why you do it (and my comments are not directed at you personally). What I don't understand is why you don't take a bit more time, and port things so they work like an OS/2 user expects them to work, rather than half way between *NIX and OS/2. You could leave out some of the more useless programs to free up some time. Personally, I use Firefox because that is really the only viable alternative. I use AOO4, because Lotus SmartSuite has developed far too many problems, and I suspect that a lot of them are caused by updates to make Firefox work. Now, if I try to run Firefox, and AOO4 together, one, or the other, always crashes, often messing the system up so badly, that I need to reboot. And, I use QPDFView, simply because it is better than Lucide, which seems to be the only other option (I suppose there is always GhostView, but it is also a terrible kludge). I would use CLAMAV, if CLAMD.EXE would not eat up all of my shared memory space, and using CLAMSCAN, without CLAMD.EXE takes "forever". CUPS is another, very important program, but it is also becoming such a kludge that it is very difficult to get it to work. SAMBA seems to be necessary to communicate with anything other than OS/2, and it is finally starting to work reasonably well. RSYNC is one of the few ports that actually works well enough to depend on it. I can't think of anything else that I use.
PTHREAD doesn't break AOO 4.1.1.1 here.
Installed Packages
pthread.i386 20140814-16.oc00
It breaks every system that I try it on, whether I install it using YUM, or manually. AOO4.1.1 either hangs, spontaneously reboots, or hard (black screen) crashes when I try to start any part of it.
QPDF works like a charm too. The last 2 versions work better than the previous ones because they don't need the 3 qpdf dll's in the path anymore for qpdfview to work in any way I choose to open it (command line, FC/2 association, wps, firefox).
The ONLY way that I can get the latest QPDFView to work, is to install it on the boot drive. If it is not on the boot drive, it can't find the plugins. I have no idea why that is the case, but it is not acceptable. I have temporarily installed it on the boot drive, to see if it is worth putting up with that major inconvenience, but it looks like I am going to go back to the older version, which does work.
Now it is very easy to keep all my OS/2 systems (Currently 4) up to date. Its easy just to tell the system "yum update".
Are they up to date? It took more than 4 months for LIBC066 to show up in YUM, after it was available as a WarpIn archive on HOBBES. Now, it appears that the PTHREAD package, that just recently showed up on YUM, was built last August. It also seems that GhostScript 9.10 is current on YUM, and apparently it contains something that GhostScript 9.15, from Paul Smedley, doesn't have. So what is "current"? Then, GCC1, and associated parts, suddenly showed up, and got installed, without being announced (at least I never heard about it before it was installed on my system). I haven't confirmed it, yet, but I am suspicious that GCC1 is responsible for the odd 5 second freeze, once or twice per day, that is happening on all of the systems where I have it installed (but it could be something else, and it could be more often). FWIW, you never know what is going to happen when you say "YUM UPDATE", and trying to figure out what it actually did is not as easy as it sounds. BTW, even Linux is moving away from YUM because it just doesn't work very well. The main difference is, that they have lots of people working on it.
The main Porting problem seems to be that Quality Control is minimal, product testing is minimal, problems are slipping through, and that is impacting the users. The main cause seems to be trying to do too much, with too few people. The other main problem, is that too few users are stepping forward to help out (and, they are often rejected, or ignored, by the programmers when they do step forward). The other main problem is that most programmers are so busy trying to port things, that they have forgotten how to write native OS/2 programs, or drivers. In times past, OS/2 was the source of many great programs (PMView is about the only one that is left). Now, OS/2 is limping along on other peoples work, patched together to make it run, and it shows. Of course, the same is true of the whole OS.
I don't know what the answer is. WIndows 7 seems to work pretty well, after you find a lot of the "helpful" things to turn them off.
I have been playing with Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon 64. That seems to work okay, after I found out how to turn off about 80% of the requests for a password (absolutely insane to ask for a password 3 times in 20 seconds). Then there is a steep learning curve that I really don't need (permissions, new commands, security, etc.). On the other hand, Linux seems to be following the lead of Windows, and it is becoming a bloated mess. Now, that is being reflected in the programs that get ported to OS/2.
I have no direct experience with Apple, but I have heard horror stories about trying to get something as basic as networking to go. Of course, windows is just as bad, or worse.
Now, I have an Android phone, that is probably capable of doing about 90% of what I use a computer for. Unfortunately, it is annoying to use, mainly because there is no real keyboard, and the screen is too small, not to mention the learning curve, and the fact that is is tied to Google (for better, or worse).
Where to next? Well, we are on a road. Nobody seems to be sure where it is going, but we are following it.