Debian Freeze Process Update

snotty6969 writes: "Freeze Update. Anthony Towns sent in an updated report about the Woody freeze process. We're almost into the last week for uploads of base packages. If there are outstanding bugs you'd like to see fixed, provide patches or upload now. We are also getting into the last days for ensuring that standard and task packages get included in the Woody release. At the moment it looks like a lot of packages will be removed from Woody. Among these are a whole bunch of commonly used programs like gpm, Mutt, CVS, Procmail, Apache and Mozilla. People who can fix bugs in these packages and care about them are encouraged to send in patches or upload fixed packages using Anthony's unofficial NMU guidelines."

Comments

What? Incomplete?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wont stand for it.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Woody freeze process

Ouchie!

Not fantastic

[Mike Connell]

I've just switched distros to debian on 3 boxes (home from mandrake, web/mail/cvs/db box at work, and a development machine). I've been really pleased that although it's a bit of a PITA to get set up right, once it's done, it's really done. Yes, apt-get is lovely.

But if things like apache and mozilla (and for me procmail and cvs) are starting to fall, how is the future looking for debian? The thing I love about it is the the fact that almost everything I use I can just apt-get, and it all fits together. If I had to start getting my own packages a lot, it would really dampen debian's best feature.

I really hope this is merely a bit of sabre-rattling done in order to stir up some activity before release.

0.02

Re:Not fantastic

[compwizrd]

This is their way of forcing the bugs to be fixed, is all, yes.

Re:Not fantastic

[Foochar]

These things are more call to arms than anything else. For example, I still depend on a working gpm so the threat of it being removed is enough that when I get home tonight I may decide to take a look and see if I can't send the maintainer some clues as to what is going on. It would be pretty hard to justify making a release without things like apache and mozilla, however if they aren't fixed then they will end up delaying the release. Debian has a bad enough history of slipping release dates without more problems to add to it.

Re:Not fantastic

[iomud]

You can always dist upgrade, I do development on an unstable box and I've yet to have any major issues. I just keep up to date with irc and debian planet to be sure there hasn't been a debain chaos event. The anal standards debian has are a blessing and a curse all at the same time.

Re:Not fantastic

[uchian]

I've had a couple of Relatively major (if you don't know what your doing and where to look for help)/Relatively minor (if you do know) problems with using unstable, with such great symptoms as xwindows failing to start (someone accidentally put quotes around something they shouldn't have) to gpm failing to detect my mouse and exiting on startup. This happened a couple of days ago, and I haven't figured out exactly what's going wrong - I just told x windows to use the mouse directly.

I just thought I should warn people that if you run unstable and update it regularly, expect the odd - as in once every couple of months - bug which will take a couple of hours of your time to fix.

Re:Not fantastic

[damiam]

They're only to keep Apache, Mozilla, etc. out of the stable version, which most people don't use anyway. If they actually do remove these packages, people who want to use them will compile them themselves, find unofficial packages, or use packages from the testing/unstable trees.

Re:Not fantastic

[CentrX]

You have to just go to IRC or DebianPlanet to make sure things aren't broken. For instance, your gpm problem is posted in the news on OPN on #debian, so if you had checked that before you upgraded, you would know the hold the package until it's fixed.

Re:Not fantastic

[CentrX]

As has been said many times before, this is just to get more people to look at the bugs in these packages to get them fixed.

Also, a ton of people use stable. For a server, say for instance a web server running Apache, stable is great. So people do use Apache on stable, and would need it.

Re:Not fantastic

[mbanck]

But if things like apache and mozilla are starting to fall, how is the future looking for debian?

Well apart from the fact that release is far away as everybody stated; mozilla-0.9.5 _is_ in woody as of this week ("The force was strong yesterday" -- Wichert Akkerman), the announcement is older.

But regarding apache, voices have been heard that want to put apache in non-free or even remove it as their license doesn't permit derived works with the same name. Now, if a patched apache debian package qualifies as a derived work was never settled on on debian-legal...

Michael

What? No apache?

[wheel]

You gotta be kidding. Isn't this one of the key components of what make Linux a force in the commercial enterprise environment?

Re:What? No apache?

[Anonymous Coward]

You gotta be kidding. Isn't this one of the key components of what make Linux a force in the commercial enterprise environment?

It's out because it's buggy. Trust me - Woody won't go completely frozen until the critical things are patched and back in.

That list of packages is just to illustrate the point that there's a LOT of work to do before Woody is ready for prime time.

What the hell is going on?

[Anonymous Coward]

If history repeats itself, Debian users are going to be stuck with whatever software versions Debian freezes on for a couple years. That's no exaggeration. Potato, the current stable, came out in 1999, and the only things that change in point releases are a few security and stability bits.

The only real alternative for a Debian user is to run unstable (slushy, which is currently Woody, is a joke, where virtually nothing is installable) . Unstable breaks something critical once a week or so, i.e. the mouse driver (last week) or XFree86 (the week before), or even ldap, leaving you having to reboot -s.

Why the hell would they freeze just before emacs21 goes in, just before KDE 2.2.2 goes in, just before ALSA goes good, etc etc?

It's like they were waiting for the worst possible moment to ensure that Debian users would have to wait as long as bloody possible to ever have the good stuff. Shouldn't this wait until after the winter vacations, when all the college kids who make up a large share of Debian developers, have more time to bang on the software?

Re:What the hell is going on?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's a "mouse driver"? Are you confusing this with some other OS, like M$ Windows?

I don't see any of the Debian users "stuck" with potato. Those who use it need a stable system, and a stable system needs to have older, more tested and understood packages. The others are happily dist-upgrading to woody every day (which is "testing", not "unstable" as you falsely claim), and I have yet to see any significant breakage in testing or even significant breakage in unstable that would have survived over 48 hours.

This is all unlike RedHat users, who have to wait for several months to get a new revision of their distro; we get all the new good stuff inside a week or two from upstream release, sometimes in a couple of days, like the Mozilla 0.9.6 which was made available in unstable just yesterday.

Re:What the hell is going on?

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderate this down because it's not touchy-feely nice, or moderate it up because it makes a good point. I'm posting anonymously because I don't think the average slash reader has enough common sense to do what's right anymore.

What's a "mouse driver"? Are you confusing this with some other OS, like M$ Windows?

She's probably referring to gpm, which was broken this week. Otherwise, he's referring to the break to the pointer devices earlier in XFree86-4, which does have a mouse driver.

I don't see any of the Debian users "stuck" with potato. Those who use it need a stable system, and a stable system needs to have older, more tested and understood packages. The others are happily dist-upgrading to woody every day (which is "testing", not "unstable" as you falsely claim), and I have yet to see any significant breakage in testing or even significant breakage in unstable that would have survived over 48 hours.

It's okay for something to be broken for 48 hours?

This is all unlike RedHat users, who have to wait for several months to get a new revision of their distro; we get all the new good stuff inside a week or two from upstream release, sometimes in a couple of days, like the Mozilla 0.9.6 which was made available in unstable just yesterday.

That's unstable, not testing. It won't be in testing for a long, long time.

And RedHat users wait a little while, yes, but that's to get new stable releases. And they never get a release where, for example, KDE is uninstallable as it's been for two weeks in testing.

Debian has a hell of a lot of work to do before it's ever going to be taken seriously. Debian is about the last thing to be supported by any Linux company, because you're either dealing with an installation that's two years outdated, or with users who haven't enough common sense not to be running a ticking timebomb of a chaotic workstation.

Re:What the hell is going on?

[Daniel]

Why the hell would they freeze just before emacs21 goes in, just before KDE 2.2.2 goes in, just before ALSA goes good, etc etc?


Because if we applied this criterion, we'd never freeze!

Someone's pet package is always going to be about to be released, and will be left in the cold; IMO, this fear of leaving old software in stable is a large part of what historically contributed to long release cycles. (I think the current one is long mainly because we've completely redone the archive/release infrastructure and we're still working out bugs in the new system. That and, sigh, the installer)

Daniel

Re:What the hell is going on?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> I have yet to see any significant breakage in testing or even significant breakage in unstable that would have survived over 48 hours.

>It's okay for something to be broken for 48 hours?

You don't need to dist-upgrade every day. I personally wasn't hit by this bug even though I use unstable; I get the new packages when I need them.

>>This is all unlike RedHat users, who have to wait for several months to get a new revision of their distro; we get all the new good stuff inside a week or two from upstream release, sometimes in a couple of days, like the Mozilla 0.9.6 which was made available in unstable just yesterday.

>That's unstable, not testing. It won't be in testing for a long, long time.

So first you say unstable is bad because it's sometimes broken and then testing is bad because it's a bit late? You can't have your argument both ways :)

The time for a package to get into testing is about two weeks. Do you get stable upgrades for a RedHat system after two weeks? For all my uses at least, the current Debian system of releasing is perfect.

>Debian has a hell of a lot of work to do before it's ever going to be taken seriously. Debian is about the last thing to be supported by any Linux company, because you're either dealing with an installation that's two years outdated, or with users who haven't enough common sense not to be running a ticking timebomb of a chaotic workstation.

My company is using Debian. Why? Because the software is upgradable and maintainable due to the standards that force Debian packages to be correct. The easiness of customization is better than anything I've seen. And anyone I know who has actually tried Debian in such an environment has agreed with me on that. People are only using RedHat because much of the same reasons people are using Windows...

Re:What the hell is going on?

[ahurt]

> People are only using RedHat because much of the > same reasons people are using Windows... Wha!! You mean HalfLife is in RPM now? ah - testing/unstable

Michael, I have a message for you

[Anonymous Coward]

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hello

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a pancake eating ninja.

A funny joke

[p3d0]

Woody freeze process.

Ouch! Sounds painful. <rimshot/>

Re:A funny joke

[Anonymous Coward]

Just think about forking the woody. Or woody branch. MMmmmm...

Bill Peterson, former Houston Oiler football coach

[Anonymous Coward]

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GTK-- vs. QT
[ Programming ]Posted by Cliff on Friday November 23, @12:20PM
from the technical-comparisons dept.
spirality asks: "The company I work for is getting ready to decide on a GUI Toolkit for our Computational Modeling Toolkit (CoMeT, www.cometsolutions.com). We would like C++ compatibility and ports to various Unices and Win32 platforms. Not supprisingly we've come up with two choices, GTK-- and QT. I've attempted to compare the two by doing alot of web surfing and searching, but I've come up with things that are consistently one or more years old. So, the question I pose is what are the (dis)advatages of GTK-- and QT, and why would I choose one of these toolkits over the other? Overall functionality, momentum for future growth, ease of use, licensing, and pretty much anything else is relevant to our decision." With QT now at version 3.0 and GTK now in the 1.2.x revisions, maybe it's time to give the two libraries some fair comparisson and discuss the new features, advantages, and disadvantages of each?

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GTK-- vs. QT | Preferences | Top | 67 comments | Search Discussion
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Qt if you need Win32 (Score:5, Informative)
by Ami Ganguli on Friday November 23, @12:33PM (#2603401)
(User #921 Info)
I actually prefer GTK+ and I think it's a better bet long-term, but I don't think the cross-platform aspect of the library gets much developer attention.

Being cross-platform is a major selling point for commerical Qt users, however, so if you need your apps to work on Windows then it's clearly the way to go.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

What about gimp? (Score:2)
by bani on Friday November 23, @12:46PM (#2603433)
(User #467531 Info)
Didn't they port gimp to win32?

gimp is THE flagship gtk application, bar none.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:What about gimp? (Score:4, Informative)
by Ami Ganguli on Friday November 23, @12:58PM (#2603454)
(User #921 Info)
It exists, but I don't think it's maintained as well. The primary developers don't really care about Win32, so maintaining it is left to a few masochists :-).

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:What about gimp? (Score:1)
by egghat on Friday November 23, @01:40PM (#2603563)
(User #73643 Info)
yeah and that's a big shame.

GTK porting was mainly done by one single person.

I think, there are a few other GTK based apps, which Windows Users would like. But without a stable GTK on Windows?

Bye egghat.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:What about gimp? (Score:0)
by crawlie on Friday November 23, @12:55PM (#2603450)
(User #235060 Info)
xchat [xchat.org] has also a win32 binary, and it uses gtk. Though, it isn't as stable as the *nix version, I think...
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Qt if you need Win32 (Score:1)
by Orycterope on Friday November 23, @01:12PM (#2603488)
(User #67067 Info | http://www.jrainville.com/)
Being cross-platform is a major selling point for commerical Qt users, however, so if you need your apps to work on Windows then it's clearly the way to go.

Absolutely.

One important thing to note about Qt is the fact that it ain't a wrapper around existing GUI APIs. It emulates the different GUIs out there, so it does the drawing itself, avoiding going through some additional API layers. That translates into a fast and responsive GUI.

I tried it on both Windows and Linux using the platform's native GUI and GUIs from other platforms, i.e. the Motif or CDE style on Windows, the Windows style on Linux. It is very convincing and very fast.

When performance matters, I definitely go with Qt.

Watch out for that "non-commercial" license on Windows though. It might not be appropriate for what you are doing. Your company will probably have to acquire a Qt license for Windows.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Qt if you need Win32 (Score:1)
by hattig (spinningnucleon@NOspam.yahoo.com) on Friday November 23, @01:26PM (#2603518)
(User #47930 Info | http://www.conewars.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday October 17, @05:04PM)
Knowing companies like I do, they will go with the most expensive solution - because expense usually means support. In this case QT is clearly the way to go, as everyone is pointing out (okay, wxWindows is another good choice, but I have no experience with this system).
QT has an easier to program API, is quick to program in, has great documentation, has support, has a huge wealth of existing code examples, and is supported on Windows. GTK is not supported on Windows, and is a one-man port job. Fine for free software like the gimp, but not for a commercial application. Don't save a couple of grand on the GUI toolkit and get yourself a lot more costs in support that you have to provide because of problems.

GTK2 might solve a lot of the problems in the current GTK of course, but I am not qualified to comment about that. And do you really want to program using a just finalised API?

QT just does things right. 'nuff said.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

An Alan Smithee Movie (Score:-1, Offtopic)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @12:39PM (#2603412)
Standing on the beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring down the barrel
At the arab on the ground
I can see his open mouth
But I hear no sound

I'm alive
I'm dead
I'm the stranger
Killing an arab

I can turn
And walk away
Or I can fire the gun
Staring at the sky
Staring at the sun
Whichever I chose
It amounts to the same
Absolutely nothing

I'm alive
I'm dead
I'm the stranger
Killing an arab

I feel the steel butt jump
Smooth in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring at myself
Reflected in the eyes
Of the dead man on the beach
The dead man on the beach

I'm alive
I'm dead
I'm the stranger
Killing an arab
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Qt if you need Win32 (Score:-1, Offtopic)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @01:21PM (#2603506)
I actually prefer GTK+ and I think it's a better bet long-term
How the hell is this +5 Informative? Ami Ganguli's opinion alone is worth +5?

Somebody get me off this sinking ship.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

licensing (Score:5, Informative)
by Cardinal Biggles on Friday November 23, @12:41PM (#2603418)
(User #6685 Info)
Overall functionality, momentum for future growth, ease of use, licensing, and pretty much anything else is relevant to our decision.
To pick up your point on licensing, Qt is either GPL or pay. So if your application will also be GPL, it's free, if your application will not be GPL you will have to pay up for Qt. GTK is LGPL AFAIK (enough acronyms for you? ;-) so that will not stand in the way of making your app non-free.

BTW, if you know C++ and want to get to know a bit about Qt, they have a pretty good tutorial online here [trolltech.com]. Just walking through the examples made me realize just how cool it is, and how much you can do in just a few lines of code.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:licensing (Score:2)
by Snowfox on Friday November 23, @01:29PM (#2603533)
(User #34467 Info | http://www.livejournal.com/~inkfox)
Overall functionality, momentum for future growth, ease of use, licensing, and pretty much anything else is relevant to our decision.
To pick up your point on licensing, Qt is either GPL or pay. So if your application will also be GPL, it's free, if your application will not be GPL you will have to pay up for Qt. GTK is LGPL AFAIK (enough acronyms for you? ;-) so that will not stand in the way of making your app non-free.
Just remember that you only need to give your source to any entity you give the binary to. Being GPL/LGPL doesn't mean you can't use it for business use; the license is entirely transparent for apps which will only be used internally.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Qt has better documentation (Score:5, Interesting)
by tgreiner on Friday November 23, @12:44PM (#2603427)
(User #107912 Info)
I have only scratched the surface of both GTK-- and QT, but I found QT to have a *very good* documentation. It has a complete class hierarchy documentation and comes with a load of example programs.

Another observation is that GTK-- is much more low-level than QT. If you want to extend it's components you might have to delve into the depths of the gdk library (which, in my view is only a thin wrapper around the X11-libs). QT on the other hand has a very good abstraction of windowing system details. Being mostly a Java programmer, I found the QT model very easy to use.

Of course, YMMV.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Qt has better documentation (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @01:32PM (#2603543)
Another observation is that GTK-- is much more low-level than QT.
Translation: GTK is far from done yet.
Sorry, there's a difference between low level and incomplete. QT does everything GTK does and more. If A can do 2 things, and B can do those 2 things as well as 10 things incorporating those 2 things, A is not more "low-level" than B. A is less complete than B.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

GTK+ C++ wrappers (Score:5, Informative)
by HalfFlat on Friday November 23, @12:44PM (#2603429)
(User #121672 Info)
I worked on a rushed project earlier this year, and used the gtk-- C++ wrapper for GTK, as well as the gnome-- wrapper (then still very much under development) for the Gnome libraries, specifically the canvas.

Personally, I found it frustrating to use. As these wrappers are still being worked on, the documentation is sketchy. The object-owning semantics are confusing (at least to me) - I was forever leaking memory or prematurely destroying objects. Trying to destroy something from within a menu callback I recall was particularly noisome. The gnome-- canvas wrappers were a moving target, though they may have since stabilised, and didn't fully expose the canvas API. Writing one's own canvas items is done in C, and then wrapped.

Perhaps with more persistance I might have figured out how to set up keyboard acceleration, but it is at anyrate a real battle to find documentation that explains what is going on with it. AFAIK, there is no straightforward way of making a multiple file selection in GTK+ 1.2. In gnome canvas (not GTK+, but a close cousin) there is promised functionality that is simply not implemented - I'm thinking here of smoothed lines, for which the code reads:

/* FIXME */

I haven't used QT yet. It certainly looks pretty, and a quick glance at the example code and docs provided seems to indicate that it's not too complicated, and well documented. I'd certainly shy away from GTK+ if a C++ interface is required.

The new version of GTK under development should address many of the shortcomings of the current toolkit, and includes goodies such as Pango. It is not yet in a stable state, however, with the API still undergoing final tweaking I believe.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Before the flame wars start... (Score:5, Insightful)
by CaptainAlbert ((ku.oc.cen.sudom-t) (ta) (senoj.neb)) on Friday November 23, @12:47PM (#2603436)
(User #162776 Info | http://slashdot.org/)
My suggestion - try them out.

Come up with a few small use cases and let your developers loose on everything you can get your hands on. Both Qt and GTK+ are freely available enough for that to be a useful exercise.

You might find that, while Qt has nicer abstractions, and provides a familiar set of classes which are (IMO) far superior to MFC... perhaps GTK has a slight edge for lower level work (which it sounds like you might get involved in). Also, see which interface builder tools your team feels most comfortable with.

The problem with this question is that the replies are likely to degenerate quickly into a C vs. C++ rant-a-thon. Yes, GTK is entirely written in C. But it *is* object oriented. It seems strange to everyone at first, but just because a language doesn't support particular features, doesn't mean that you can't use a particular programming style. OO methodology is just as relevant to C programmers as to C++ or Java programmers.

If your programmers are good, they'll write good code whatever the toolkit. Just make sure everyone thinks that they got a say in the decision. ;-)
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Portability to Win32 (Score:5, Informative)
by kintel on Friday November 23, @12:51PM (#2603441)
(User #28098 Info)
AFAIK, the Win32 port of GTK+ is more or less a one-man show, making GTK pretty unstable and lagging behind on Windows.
In addition, Qt now has a Mac OS X port.

Add this to the excellent commercial support from Trolltech.

Design and language issues not taken into account.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

QT seems to rule (Score:4, Interesting)
by PRobinson on Friday November 23, @12:25PM (#2603384)
(User #471021 Info)
I've recently got my Sharp SL-5000D which comes with a cute embedded version of QT. I'm starting to play with it some more, and I have to say I'm impressed. I've not done much GUI dev. under 'nix before, but I've followed many threads in the past elsewhere that suggests GTK is a hodge-podge and is getting out of control, with no coherent design.

I'm not experienced, but as a lay-man, I'd have to say go for QT.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:QT seems to rule (Score:1)
by Capt. Beyond on Friday November 23, @01:04PM (#2603472)
(User #179592 Info)
You are correct. I have developed with QT for around 3 years now, and back then, I did check out GTK--, and it seemed very much a hodge-podge. I can't imagine it being any better now. I use QT on linux and windows and am going to be porting my program to the SL-5000D. (with the good graces of Sharp) How cool is that?
If I had a Mac, I'd port it to that.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:QT seems to rule (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @01:20PM (#2603501)
and am going to be porting my program to the SL-5000D
Just out of interest what does your program do? Do you see any potential problems porting to the SL-5000D?

Did you intend it to have a cross-platform GUI from the outset?

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:QT seems to rule (Score:0, Redundant)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @12:33PM (#2603400)
Great,
So basically you don't know anything about GTK and you know next to nothing about QT, but here you are to offer the world your opinions for everyone to see. And, to top it off, you state that your opinion of GTK is based upong something you claim to have read in the past, but of course you offer no link or location for anyone to check your references. Great. Let me guess, I'll bet you're a rocket scientist for NASA?

Then, to top it all off, some little 15 year old pissant with mod points gives you a plus one for your post which is in reality worthless. Perfect, just perfect.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:QT seems to rule (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @12:42PM (#2603420)
But 'dude' (I think this is the correct form of address in these parts)...
I think you'll find that this is what Slashdot is all about and that the above was a Slashdot post in the classical mould.

If correct Slashdot protocols are followed, we will now be treated to a spectacularly ill-informed and subjective QT vs GTK flame war.

Mod me down Scotty!

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:QT seems to rule (Score:-1)
by George WIPO Bush on Friday November 23, @12:42PM (#2603421)
(User #308209 Info | aim:goim?screenname=The+WIPO+Troll | Last Journal: Wednesday November 21, @05:16AM)
Man, you need to masturbate more. You can start here [bashfulmonkey.com]. They're yummy.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

wxWindows (slightly OT) (Score:4, Informative)
by Balinares on Friday November 23, @12:34PM (#2603403)
(User #316703 Info | http://slashdot.org/)
You may also want to take a look at the wxWindows toolkit [wxwindows.org]. It's a wrapper over what's available on a given platform (the native API in Win32, GTK in the Unix world, and there's a Mac port in progress, I believe). Good stuff, definitely, especially if what you want is C++ and portability. Note that your apps will look totally windowsy on win32, so your users will not be confused by their look.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Mozilla (slightly OT too) (Score:3, Offtopic)
by mvw (van.woerkom@netcologne.de) on Friday November 23, @12:52PM (#2603442)
(User #2916 Info | http://people.freebsd.org/~3d)
Another alternative is using Mozilla as IDE. This might sound a bit crazy right now, but I believe this idea will get more followers, if Mozilla gets more and more stable.
An example is the Komodo IDE [activestate.com] by ActiveState, which uses XUL.

XUL [xulplanet.com] is the next generation browser application platform. Simply speaking, the Mozilla [mozilla.org] team chose an approach very similiar to JAVA [sun.com] to come closer to a platform independent graphical user interface:

implement a set of base compenents on the most popular platforms (Win32, Mac, UNIX, ..), that render your JAVA specific widgets in terms of the native GUI.
implement your applications in your JAVA language
compile application
distribute JAVA binaries
XUL goes one step farther, as there is no compilation step.

The XUL application implementation language is a XML language that together with cascading style sheets and JavaScript glue will yield an application one starts in the browser by opening the .xul document.

A possible advantage of XUL might become the relative ease of application development, change and distribution.

Possible problems will be similiar to the ones known from JAVA. The qualitiy of XUL applications will stand and fall with the quality of the XUL implementation for a specific platform, which right now means the quality of its Mozilla or Netscape implementation.

Of course, compared to JAVA, which has underwent several larger development cycles and now features mighty libraries, XUL is a bleeding edge technology at its beginnings.

However it is still possible to make direct use of the various Mozilla widgets as well from C++.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Mozilla (slightly OT too) (Score:2)
by ajs (ajs@ajs.com) on Friday November 23, @01:42PM (#2603567)
(User #35943 Info | http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/)
I've played with Komodo, and I have to say that I'm impressed. XUL+Moizilla can certainly be turned to one's advantage. I imagine that the crucial point is where you put the dividing line between your app and the UI. I would think that you'd want to build only the highest level UI pieces in XUL, and then the rest of your app in a low level language.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Mozilla (slightly OT too) (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @01:26PM (#2603520)
Another alternative is using Mozilla as IDE.
And another alternative is replacing all your divides with loops that subtract a lot. They're both great ways to slow the hell out of your app. :)

Sorry, but building an app with Mozilla as your interface library is like deciding to layer MFC on top of Visual Logo or something.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Mozilla (slightly OT too) (Score:2)
by ajs (ajs@ajs.com) on Friday November 23, @01:36PM (#2603550)
(User #35943 Info | http://www.ajs.com/~ajs/)
1. Have you used anything built on top of Mozilla (e.g. Komodo) or are you just flaming because it feels good?
2. If you actually needed a UI that was as rich and powerful as XUL can provide, why woulld you want to go off an write it al yourself?
3. Are you thinking in terms of writing web pages and CGI that acts as an application, or are you thinking in terms of building your UI into the XUL interface of Mozilla? These are very different things (and both actually have a place in different applications).
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:wxWindows (slightly OT) (Score:1)
by ghoti on Friday November 23, @01:30PM (#2603536)
(User #60903 Info | http://www.kosara.net/)
wxWindows is really great. Not only does it contain a lot of useful stuff (and far beyond just UI things, also threads, sockets, etc), but they also have very good documentation. When I looked at GTK--, the documentation was totally unusable. There were lots of classes without a single word of documentation.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Some REAL points (Score:3, Insightful)
by faber on Friday November 23, @12:53PM (#2603446)
(User #142067 Info | http://www.programmfabrik.de)
Developing for a professional product I would always go with as many professional tools as possible.
To me QT seems to be the FAR better decision. It has true interoperablity between Win32, MacOS X and X11.
QT is C++ from the ground up, GTK-- is wrapping GTK++.
Furthermore with GTK you definitely write more code to accomplish the same.
QT 3 gives you access to SQL-databases from its widgets.
QT comes with a very good interface builder.
QT based programes feel snappier than GTK based ones.
One drawback might be that you have to preprocess (actually your Makefile has to) your code before its ready for the compiler, but that's not a big deal.
With Kdevelop you have access to a very good IDE.
One thing I don't know is how QT works in terms of different GUI threads, but I neither know for GTK.
So please, go with QT and be happy

A much harder decision would be: What should I use for my Web-Frontend, mod_perl or PHP... but that's a different story!

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Licencing (Score:2, Insightful)
by CH-BuG on Friday November 23, @12:43PM (#2603423)
(User #55283 Info)
If you intend to develop a closed-source product, the licence of both library will probably need to be evaluated too. If you go for
an open licence, then it's of minor importance.
(Qt requires licencing fees if you want to keep
your sources closed).
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Licencing (Score:1)
by zmooc (zmoocNO@SPAMzmooc.net) on Friday November 23, @01:04PM (#2603470)
(User #33175 Info | http://zmooc.net/)
As far as I know/understand, QT is GPL and GTK is LGPL so you can't make a closed-source application based on QT unless you buy a license from Trolltech.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

A third alternative... :) (Score:2, Redundant)
by jonathan_ingram on Friday November 23, @12:45PM (#2603431)
(User #30440 Info)
I'm a great fan of Qt, but I don't believe it's always the best toolkit to use for cross platform compatibility (although it is the best toolkit available for UNIX-based systems), plus there are complications about the licenses differing versions are available under. GTK-- and its competitors (Inti?) only have a very small user and documentation base, so they are probably not a good choice for a large commercial project.
If you want cross platform compatibilty with C++, then check out wxWindows [wxwindows.org]. It has ports to Windows, MacOS (9 & X), UNIX + Motif, UNIX + GTK. It also has a very well developed Python binding [wxpython.org] -- so well developed that quite a few people want it adopted as the official Python GUI instead of TKinter.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Mozilla? (Score:2, Insightful)
by dannyspanner on Friday November 23, @01:00PM (#2603458)
(User #135912 Info | http://fantasyfilmleague.com/)
I'm not trying to sound stupid or off-topic here, but have you considered Mozilla [mozilla.org]? Beyond ther browser, they've developed a really interesting cross-platform C++ (and JavaScript) development platform. For a start there's a cross platform implementation of COM [mozilla.org] and you can develop your UI's in an XML dialect called XUL [mozilla.org].
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

New GTK+ (Score:2)
by JanneM (see.my.homepage) on Friday November 23, @01:12PM (#2603484)
(User #7445 Info | http://lucs.lu.se/People/Jan.Moren/ | Last Journal: Saturday August 18, @09:06AM)
Don't forget that an all-new GTK+ version is just coming out, a cleaner design, vastly improved i18n support, and all. I suggest you look at GTK2 (and it's C++ wrappers) as well, as this is what's going to be used, rather than the current version.

/Janne
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

I switched from Gtk-- to Qt (Score:2)
by Per Abrahamsen (abraham@dina.kvl.dk) on Friday November 23, @01:22PM (#2603507)
(User #1397 Info | http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/)
From a conceptual point of view, I like Gtk-- better. It actually uses the modern C++ language, including the C++ type system. This way you avoid the need for a preprocessor, and get static typechecking instead of "dynamic typechecking" (i.e. "the user does the checking"), which is the entire point of using C++ in the first place. It also use the standard C++ library instead of duplicating it poorly, so you don't have to deal with multiple string types and the like. Since the application is a GUI frontend to a library written in standard C++, using the standard C++ library classes, this matter a lot. Qt is written for an ancient subset of C++, something closer to "C with Classes" than the C++ standard.

However, Qt is simple to use, well documented, and have stable API's. In practice, these make it much easier to use than Gtk--.

As an extra plus, Qt is GPL and therefore more gnulitically correct than Gtk--, which is only LGPL.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:I switched from Gtk-- to Qt (Score:2)
by Dr. Evil (mgjkNOSP@Mhotmail.com) on Friday November 23, @01:38PM (#2603556)
(User #3501 Info)

As an extra plus, Qt is GPL and therefore more gnulitically correct than Gtk--, which is only LGPL.
The LGPL was written specifically to get around the 'viral' aspects of the GPL. Meaning that while Gtk-- gives you the option to GPL your product, QT does not. With QT you MUST use the GPL... unless you pay Troll Tech an arbitrary, although currently quite reasonable sum.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

GTK Seems solid, but slow on Solaris (Score:1)
by Dooferlad (doofer-public@thelongslide.com) on Friday November 23, @12:41PM (#2603417)
(User #101535 Info | http://www.thelongslide.com/)
...but a little slow on Solaris 8. Maybe it is just me, but my build of Mozilla really jerkey on a workstation (UltraSPARK III, 2G RAM). On the other hand The Gimp runs like a dream on my Windows box, and Mozilla is zappy on Linux.

--
Dooferlad
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:GTK Seems solid, but slow on Solaris (Score:1)
by chegosaurus (cheggy_peg@hotmail.com) on Friday November 23, @01:32PM (#2603540)
(User #98703 Info | http://helios.hud.ac.uk/rob/)
Have you got some shared memory available to GTK on Solaris? Rebuild it to use mit-shm, and with no debugging code.

Gtk is equally quick on my Solaris/Linux/FreeBSD machines.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Cross platform? (Score:1)
by Nicolas MONNET (nico@@@altiva...fr) on Friday November 23, @12:43PM (#2603424)
(User #4727 Info | http://slashdot.org/)
Are you going to develop two versions -- one for Windows using MFC and one for Linux using GTK or QT? -- or do you plan to use one library for both?

Using GTK excludes the latter, as while it can be used on Windows, and thus makes it possible to port programs such as Gimp to this platform, it's not exactly its most supported feature. And it doesn't look like native Windows.

On the other hand Qt is really supported on Windows -- actually, you have to pay for it.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

plattforms (Score:1)
by omich (omich&werk01,de) on Friday November 23, @12:43PM (#2603425)
(User #522296 Info | http://www.werk01.de/)
If MacOS-X might be a target platform for you, your choice should be QT.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Why not wxWindows? (Score:1, Redundant)
by joerg on Friday November 23, @12:45PM (#2603430)
(User #55054 Info)
Why don't you consider using wxWindows [wxwindows.org]? It is a great portable toolkit for free (LGPL licensed).
wxWindows [wxwindows.org] has a very rich feature set for building GUIs, plus many other benefits like portable classes for threads, networking, ipc, file i/o, serialization and much more. It is available for almost any kind of UNIX-like OS, for any Windows version, and some more platforms like VMS.

It is a shame that wxWindows [wxwindows.org] doesn't yet get more attention.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

What about wxWindows? (Score:1)
by SerpentMage (ChristianHGrossNO@SPAMyahoo.ca) on Friday November 23, @01:10PM (#2603481)
(User #13390 Info | http://slashdot.org/)
Ever tried wxWindows? I and my company use it. IT IS REALLY nice and easy to use. And it is open source. Best of all it does "little" things like printing...
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Well.. (Score:1)
by DGolden on Friday November 23, @01:17PM (#2603491)
(User #17848 Info)
Geez. Talk about flamebait topic. Personally (and personal opinion only, here), I'd say, Qt is better designed, clearer, and easier from a programming standpoint - but it's actually not clean C++, what with its dodgy signals/slots stuff, that gtk-- manages to do within the bounds of the language.

If you're writing commercial, proprietary software, then you have to pay to use Qt - but Trolltech provide a thoroughly professionally supported toolkit to you for your money.

The Qt class library is actually more akin to the standard set of Java classes than just a widget set - there's decent cross-platform support for sockets, xml, threads, unicode, etc. It really makes C++ programming very easy.

OF course, there's other cross-platform C++ tollkits like FLTK [fltk.org]... The gui toolkit page [geocities.com] lists many more.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

If internationalisation matters... (Score:1)
by tempfile on Friday November 23, @01:19PM (#2603497)
(User #528337 Info)
...go for Qt. Gtk, IMO, has the huge disadvantage that the current 1.2 revision doesn't support Unicode, whereas Qt fully relies on it and even provides GUI-independent helper classes for all kinds of Unicode conversion that you can use anywhere in the program. This would also help for the mathematical symbols that you probably want to display. It looks like Gtk2 will use Unicode and Pango, thus potentially blowing away the competition, but as long as there's no stable version of Gtk2, I'd go for Qt.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

FOX Toolkit (Score:1)
by Phantasiere (nrich@nospam.iinet.net.au) on Friday November 23, @01:32PM (#2603542)
(User #209248 Info | http://www.telefragged.com/transformers/)
Have you looked into the FOX Toolkit? It's written in C++, is available on many UNIX and Windows platforms and has many bindings to other languages (Ruby, Python, Eiffel). You can find it here [fox-toolkit.org].
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:FOX Toolkit (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @01:45PM (#2603572)
Really impressive are the screenshots of little red X's.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

QT forces non standard c++ use (Score:1)
by Charley's Angel on Friday November 23, @01:37PM (#2603555)
(User #307730 Info)
The big difference is that gtk-- is based on the C++ standard library, and so allows you do use familiar and efficient constructs like std::vector, std::string and so on.

QT has reimplemented all those things as a rather dodgy set of proprietry classes, which lock you into, for example using QString rather than std::string throughout your application, or doing a lot of extraneous conversions every time you need to talk to the GUI.

In its favour, QT does have much better documentation than gtk--, but all the same, I prefer the standards based gtk--.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:QT forces non standard c++ use (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @01:41PM (#2603564)
Hooray for cross platform standard classes. You can definitely tell that QT is trying to turn itself into a platform instead of a GUI toolkit can't you? How long before it has classes that do most of what Java can do? Does QT provide any collections (standard data structures) classes as well?
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

First post? (Score:0, Troll)
by Grab (ratelect@(no.spam.here.)hotmail.com) on Friday November 23, @12:27PM (#2603389)
(User #126025 Info | http://(no.spam.here...al-electronics.co.uk)
Is this my first first post? ;-)

Seriously, I'm interested in this myself - I'm working on a universal chip programmer and I need a toolkit to do this. I'd rather not use VC! :-)

Grab.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

slashdot really needs... (Score:0, Offtopic)
by bani on Friday November 23, @12:41PM (#2603419)
(User #467531 Info)
... a "flamebait" or "troll" story category ...
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:slashdot really needs... (Score:1)
by fredrik70 (fredrik70@no.yahoo.spam.com) on Friday November 23, @01:28PM (#2603527)
(User #161208 Info | http://www.clamp.org.uk/)
now, I would definetly mod this one as funny actually...
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Sorry. (Score:0, Offtopic)
by buzzbomb (buzzbomb&triad,rr,com) on Friday November 23, @01:18PM (#2603495)
(User #46085 Info | http://home.triad.rr.com/buzzbomb)
I wanted to take Friday off too, but the boss said I couldn't.

Guess you'll have to do your own homework.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

I think we're missing the crux of this article.... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @01:47PM (#2603582)
"The company I work for is getting ready to decide on a GUI Toolkit for
our Computational Modeling Toolkit (CoMeT, www.cometsolutions.com)."

It was nothing more and nothing less than a way of getting tens of thousands of nerds to visit the company URL.

The only other possibility is that he _really is_ asking Slashdot readers for programming advice. In which case he should just save us the trouble and link to fuckedcompany.com.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

All quiet on the Slashdot front??? (Score:-1, Offtopic)
by FyRE666 on Friday November 23, @12:23PM (#2603379)
(User #263011 Info | http://www.javascript-games.org/)
Where are all the comments? Is anybody out there?... Hello?...
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:All quiet on the Slashdot front??? (Score:1)
by Lispy (nofun@microsoft.com) on Friday November 23, @12:33PM (#2603399)
(User #136512 Info | http://www.Lispy.com)
Im here...but i frankly have to opinion since i only use and never hacked those libs before.

Maybe its a point to choose a central maintained Lib such as QT if your product is going to be commercial. As far as i can tell Trolltech is doing a good job with it.

Personally i prefer the GTK as a User, i find the Applications more coherent to use, but thats mostly thanks to Gnome, i guess.

So, thats as much as i can say about it...wont help you a bit, i bet!
Have a nice Weekend all you slashdotters out there..

Lispy
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Bwhahahahahahaha (Score:-1, Offtopic)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @12:24PM (#2603382)
It looks like it's going to be a troll friday, eh.
what next Taco, how about a rousing vi against emacs story?

Oh, first post for Jesus !!!!

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Bwhahahahahahaha (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @12:39PM (#2603411)
I actually agree with you, we just add 2 stories about Open Source viability, a new Linux kernel, some Mozilla release, ...
Most of this stuff was able to start flamewars so here we have a huge potential.
Does Slashdot want to declare war on tertro(ll)rism ???
what about a good old atari vs amiga troll ?
or windows vs apple ?
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

ohhh man I... (Score:-1, Offtopic)
by raffe on Friday November 23, @12:32PM (#2603395)
(User #28595 Info)
see a great flamewar comming!!! This should be a post!
:-P
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

GTK and Qt... (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @12:35PM (#2603405)
... both suck! Motif forever!
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

GTK vs. QT -- a comparison (Score:-1, Redundant)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @12:35PM (#2603404)
GTK has 3 letters.
QT has 2.

GTK starts with a "G".
QT starts with a "Q".

GTK ends with a "K".
QT ends with a "T".
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:GTK vs. QT -- a comparison (Score:-1)
by George WIPO Bush on Friday November 23, @12:46PM (#2603434)
(User #308209 Info | aim:goim?screenname=The+WIPO+Troll | Last Journal: Wednesday November 21, @05:16AM)
And I have my penis up these two's [bashfulmonkey.com] pert little asses.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:GTK vs. QT -- a comparison (Score:-1, Offtopic)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @01:29PM (#2603532)
If you're trying to entertain us, please do it well and post some links to other sluts as well. Thanks.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Fuck QT, Fuck Windows and motherfuck Prince (Score:-1, Troll)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @12:36PM (#2603406)
spiralX asks: "The company I work for is getting ready to decide on an OSToolkit for our Computational Modeling Toolkit (CuMeT, www.cumetsolutions.com). We would like C++ compatibility and ports to various Unices and Win32 platforms. Not supprisingly we've come up with two choices, LINUX-- and BSD. I've attempted to compare the two by doing alot of web surfing and searching, but I've come up with things that are consistently one or more years old. So, the question I pose is what are the (dis)advantages of LINUX-- and BSD, and why would I choose one of these toolkits over the other? Overall functionality, momentum for future growth, ease of use, licensing, and pretty much anything else is relevant to our decision." With BSD now at version 3.0 and LINUX now in the 1.2.x revisions, maybe it's time to give the two libraries some fair comparisson and discuss the new features, advantages, and disadvantages of each? Actually, on the other hand why don't you freaks argue pointlessly over something you know nothing about? As per fucking usual.
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Taco-snotting the Olsen twins! (Score:-1)
by George WIPO Bush on Friday November 23, @12:36PM (#2603407)
(User #308209 Info | aim:goim?screenname=The+WIPO+Troll | Last Journal: Wednesday November 21, @05:16AM)
I should be posting Taco-snotting stories [slashdot.org], but I'm just too busy masturbating under my desk to pictures of these little cuties [bashfulmonkey.com]! Mmmmmm, look at their under-age little bodies [bashfulmonkey.com]... don't you want a piece of that??? Mmmm, feet [bashfulmonkey.com]...
*wanks*
*spooges on their feet*

THE OFFICIAL TACO-SNOTTING FAQ [slashdot.org]
By The WIPO Troll [slashdot.org], $Revision: 1.10 $

What is "Taco-snotting?"

"Taco-snotting" is a term used by one Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda [cmdrtaco.net], owner of the popular technology website Slashdot [slashdot.org], to refer to the practice of sucking the penis of a homosexual man (or unwilling heterosexual; CmdrTaco doesn't care, and is rumored to actually prefer rape) and blowing the semen back out his nose onto his partner's (or victim's) face or body. Usually a long, bubbly stream of milky-white semen is left on CmdrTaco's face, dribbling out of his nose, down his cheek: hence the term, "Taco-snotting."
Good Lord. And what is a "Circle-snot"?

A "circle-snot" is a Taco-snotting circle-jerk, another practice common among homosexual geeks. This is when CmdrTaco, CowboiKneel [yahoo.com], and Homos get together and Taco-snot each other repeatedly with their gooey, hot, and sticky cum -- spooging their dicks all over each other's faces and pasty-white bodies until they're all covered head to toe with man juice. Roblowme usually provides plenty of extra lubricant; he owns a limo service and has ample supplies of motor oil and axle grease.
To complete this perverted orgy, fellow geeks Michael, Timothy, and Jamie often join in, dressed in black Gestapo uniforms, jack boots, and leather gloves. The whole group then proceeds to snot each other's spunk and whip each other's pudgy asses with riding crops and chains until their pasty-white geek bodies are sweaty and exhausted from all the passionate, homosexual revelry.
Ewwwww. Why have I been receiving emails from CmdrTaco asking me if he can Taco-snot me?

I'm guessing you've received an email similar to the following:
From: malda@slashdot.org [mailto]
To: wipotroll@hotmail.com
Subject: Hey, baby - jion me in a taco-snott! :)

Hey, baby!

Ever done a taco-snotting with anothar fellow geek? Its more fun then trolling Slashdot, trust me! all that talk you troll with about homasexual incest and stuff got me all horny and hot for you! Is it serius? Please tell me that itt is! If you want to get with me and my Slashdot bois, drop me an emale!

ps- Please replie to me at horny_rob_6969@hotmail.com. I'd rather the guys at VA Linux are not seen this. :) :)

--
CmdrTaco (malda@slashdot.org [mailto])
You most likely forgot to uncheck the "Willing to Taco-snot" checkbox in your account preferences. Whenever CmdrTaco gets bored (and who wouldn't, running a site like Slashdot all day), he roams through the Slashdot database, penis in hand, looking for people who might enjoy being Taco-snotted. How he determines this is anyone's guess; but if you have a homosexual-sounding nickname, you're in trouble. So this time, he found you. Lucky you.
CmdrTaco has probably already got the hots for your wad, a
Read the rest of this comment...

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Fuck you (Score:-1)
by George WIPO Bush on Friday November 23, @01:00PM (#2603459)
(User #308209 Info | aim:goim?screenname=The+WIPO+Troll | Last Journal: Wednesday November 21, @05:16AM)

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|qww|. . . . . . |sad|. .|dsa|. |qwe|. . . . . |fct||f03|
|wwq|. . . . . . |sad|. .|das|. |vcz|. . . . . |cvm|.|ooq|
|wwq|. . . . . . |asd|. .|sda|.|34vi. .|vm|. |cmp|. |ico|
|qww|. . . . . . .|dsafkjsad|. . .|mcvzpewq|.|oiw|. .|301|
|qww|. . . . . . . |dkljkdf|. . . .|392090|. . |;zz|. . |mzx|

|mac|. . |mmn|. . . |oofo0o|. . . |asc|. .|cja|
.|cvs| .|poe|. . . |mvfcpe3r|. . .|vco|. .|vio|
. |vc3||oi3|. . . |ioa|. .|dfi|. .|cio|. .|903|
. .|ioiewe|. . . .|io3|. .|ioo|. .|vmn|. .|ioo|
. . |coid|. . . . |moi|. .|ioe|. .|mvo|. .|oi3|
. . |mvoe|. . . . |cvb|. .|jio|. .|poq|. .|mv1|
. . |qabz|. . . . |plm|. .|ijn|. .|mo3|. .|edc|
. . |crbf|. . . . |m45|. .|i9p|. .|mvo|. .|qou|
. . |djio|. . . . .|wejiroji|. . . |vvoqieorj|
. . |iowr|. . . . . |mvioae|. . . . |vmiower|
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Fuck you (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23, @01:47PM (#2603579)
excellent work, please keep it up..
i can't wait till the day the lameness filter gets so complex and convoluted and normal post will never get through.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Fuck me, please! (Score:-1)
by George WIPO Bush on Friday November 23, @01:25PM (#2603517)
(User #308209 Info | aim:goim?screenname=The+WIPO+Troll | Last Journal: Wednesday November 21, @05:16AM)

|jkldf;jizofw|. .|asd|. .|dsa|. . .|wavcx|. . .|cvb|. . |ioe|
|zcxvwcmpfecq|. .|das|. .|sad|. . |vccpoiur|. .|pzc|. .|00o|
|vcC|. . . . . . |sda|. .|ads|. .|fjdi. .|fd|. |tgh|. |oOo|
|ewrivgor|. . . .|das|. .|dsa|. |jio|. . . . . |302|.|pod|
|czm,ivqo|. . . .|dsa|. .|sda|. |czz|. . . . . |329||cvm|
|qww|. . . . . . |sad|. .|dsa|. |qwe|. . . . . |fct||f03|
|wwq|. . . . . . |sad|. .|das|. |vcz|. . . . . |cvm|.|ooq|
|wwq|. . . . . . |asd|. .|sda|.|34vi. .|vm|. |cmp|. |ico|
|qww|. . . . . . .|dsafkjsad|. . .|mcvzpewq|.|oiw|. .|301|
|qww|. . . . . . . |dkljkdf|. . . .|392090|. . |;zz|. . |mzx|

|mac|. . |mmn|. . . |oofo0o|. . . |asc|. .|cja|
.|cvs| .|poe|. . . |mvfcpe3r|. . .|vco|. .|vio|
. |vc3||oi3|. . . |ioa|. .|dfi|. .|cio|. .|903|
. .|ioiewe|. . . .|io3|. .|ioo|. .|vmn|. .|ioo|
. . |coid|. . . . |moi|. .|ioe|. .|mvo|. .|oi3|
. . |mvoe|. . . . |cvb|. .|jio|. .|poq|. .|mv1|
. . |qabz|. . . . |plm|. .|ijn|. .|mo3|. .|edc|
. . |crbf|. . . . |m45|. .|i9p|. .|mvo|. .|qou|
. . |djio|. . . . .|wejiroji|. . . |vvoqieorj|
. . |iowr|. . . . . |mvioae|. . . . |vmiower|
[ Reply to This | Parent ]

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hello, my name is..

[Anonymous Coward]

|.- - - -- - - -.| | | | Eat My Nuts | | | | _ _ _ _ __ _ | ' - -- . . - - - ' | _|/ | ." ". | /(o)-(o)\ /_)| / | |_)| '- | \_)\ '.___.' / |\/|_ | \ \_/ / _| '/ |_\ \.___./ \ ) / \ \_/\__/\__ ==| \ \ /\ /\ `\ | \ \\// \ | `\ /\ / | ; | \____/ | | |

Where's the equivalent of the Slash we once knew?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slash used to be a great place for serious technical discussions. It's continued to plummet into a "+5 Insightful" world of uninformed guesses and "+5 Funny" non-humor.

It's cool that there's a place people can cut loose and talk shop/hobby. But I want the old place where bitchslapping someone for saying something stupid wasn't flamebait, and moderators don't blow mod points on things that just happen to sound good.

Where are the real technical discussions happening these days? Where's the alternative to Slash?

Old news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't this posted yesterday ?

I have to add some text because of that stupid lameness filter.

Seems quite alarming...

[evbergen]

From the looks of it, this seems more than a bit serious. Would perhaps being dependent to a large extent on 'downstream' maintainers (who take care of the packaging) be part of the problem?

Perhaps people should encourage 'upstream' developers more to accept debian package building specs as part of their base tree.

As a developer, you still need to know a bit of how the packaging system works, but it would probably make you feel more responsible if it's included in your own releases.

Perhaps I'm way off and this all has nothing to do with it though...

Re:Seems quite alarming...

[eff]

Perhaps people should encourage 'upstream' developers more to accept debian package building specs as part of their base tree

Well, they could at least send a note to the upstream developers when they find a problem...

(I'm the author of one of the listed packages, and I don't have the slightest idea what that announcement is talking about. My library sure doesn't depend on the library they claim is buggy...)

Olsen twins!!

[George WIPO Bush]

I should be posting Taco-snotting stories, but I'm just too busy masturbating under my desk to pictures of these little cuties! Mmmmmm, look at their under-age little bodies... don't you want a piece of that??? Mmmm, feet...

*wanks*
*spooges on their feet and toes*

Re:Where's the equivalent of the Slash we once kne

[Anonymous Coward]

It's down at the bar. Thanks to you isolationist yanks the internet communities are dying..

It's a sad day.

Who needs attribution, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

This submission was lifted verbatim from the most recent Debian Weekly News. I just felt someone should point this out, since the submitter didn't seem to consider it worth mentioning.

Re:Who needs attribution, eh?

[snotty6969]

Nope; That didn't come out the way it should. Is there a way to rectify this? And thanks for pointing that out for me.

Where's the equivalent of the Slash we once knew?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slash used to be a great place for serious technical discussions. It's continued to plummet into a "+5 Insightful" world of uninformed guesses and "+5 Funny" non-humor.

It's cool that there's a place people can cut loose and talk shop/hobby. But I want the old place where bitchslapping someone for saying something stupid wasn't flamebait, and moderators don't blow mod points on things that just happen to sound good.

Where are the real technical discussions happening these days? Where's the alternative to Slash?

Re:Where's the equivalent of the Slash we once kne

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to isolationist "yanks" the fucking Internet exists in the first place. Fuck off.

Proxying through for some more TROLLING

[George WIPO Bush]

|.- - - -- - - -.| | | | FUCK YOU ALL| | | | _ _ _ _ __ _ | ' - -- . . - - - ' | _|/ | ." ". | /(o)-(o)\ /_)| / | |_)| '- | \_)\ '.___.' / |\/|_ | \ \_/ / _| '/ |_\ \.___./ \ ) / \ \_/\__/\__ ==| \ \ /\ /\ `\ | \ \\// \ | `\ /\ / | ; | \____/ | | |

No need for alarm...

[HoserHead]

...this, as others have mentioned, is more of a wake-up call to maintainers than anything. Apache _will_ ship with Debian 3.0, because maintainers will make it as bug-free as possible, because they care about it. gpm has already been fixed of most (all?) of its bugs. Similarly, we can expect all of the other major packages to be fixed in the next couple of days.

Don't worry, people. The packages you care about will be in Debian 3.0. (Including mpg321!) We'll make sure of it. :)

Re:No need for alarm...

[Anonymous Coward]

The next morning, Judy came down to breakfast. "Morning", she
said. I smiled at her and dropped a hint that she had left her door
open. "Yes, I did..." I looked at her as if she was crazy. "Scrambled?
Now why did you do a thing like that?" "Please... And you got turned-on
like crazy when I licked your nipples last night..." I dropped an egg.
What?!? Judy laughed, and explained she was a werewolf. Every time
there is a full moon, she turns into a dog. But even that she could
live with... Except every time she changed, she got horny! "Ever try to
find a guy who was horny enough to have sex with a dog? Before last
night I haven't screwed anything human for a month!"

Re:No need for alarm...

[Daniel]

Indeed, I seem to recall that in past releases, little unimportant packages like libc6, boot-floppies, and dpkg were among the ones being "targeted for removal if you don't fix them" :)

(feel free to correct me if my memory misfired)

Daniel

Shut the fuck up!!

[George WIPO Bush]

• |.- - - -- - - -.| | | | CAN I GET A| | | | WHOOOAAA, | | SHUT THE | | FUCK UP!!! | | | | _ _ _ _ __ _ | ' - -- . . - - - ' | _|/ | ." ". | /(o)-(o)\ /_)| / | |_)| '- | \_)\ '.___.' / |\/|_ | \ \_/ / _| '/ |_\ \.___./ \ ) / \ \_/\__/\__ ==| \ \ /\ /\ `\ | \ \\// \ | `\ /\ / | ; | \____/ | | |

Re:Where's the equivalent of the Slash we once kne

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks to isolationist "yanks" the fucking Internet exists in the first place. Fuck off.

Bzzzt. The first Internet nodes were in Noble (Africa), and Sweden shortly thereafter.

America came about fifth.

America was the first to have email, true, but rest assured that somebody else would have created it if the US hadn't.

And the killer app is web browsing, not email, and that came from Portugal, so you can't even stand on that.

Get a fucking history book or do a little research instead of listening to the shit fed you by some clueless TA or making assumptions based on warmongering national pride.

KDE version?

[Anonymous Coward]

What version of KDE will there be in "Woody final"? 2.2.2?

Re:KDE version?

[tacocat]

Currently, KDE 2.2.2 is in woody. I can't say it's complete in all it's features and apps, but it works very nicely! Been using it for weeks now.

Re:KDE version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean 2.2.1? it came in about 2 weeks or so ago, I havent seen 2.2.2 yet, perhaps you are getting it from sid. lookup "kdebase" at packages.debian.org, it will tell you what version is in each release.

Re:KDE version?

[Patrick Dung]

I downloaded KDE 2.2.2 deb package from /debian/pool/main/.. It runs great with Qt 2.3.1 (it seems Qt 2.3.2 sucks).

Internal Message

[cd-w]

This message is really meant to be an internal Debian deleloper message! The threat of dropping Apache etc. is really just to get the developers to fix those last few bugs. This
happened last time when Potato was frozen. A few packages were dropped, but nothing that could be considered serious. As an aside, dropping gdb probably would be a good idea. It always seems to cause hassles with the mouse under X.

Re:Internal Message

[Anonymous Coward]

As an aside, dropping gdb probably would be a good idea. It always seems to cause hassles with the mouse under X.

What does gdb have to do with the mouse and X? I had troubles with gpm but found those were easily fixed by just symlinking /dev/mouse to /dev/gpmdata and letting it work through the info there. No more erratic mouse movements. :-)

That's the whole purpose of a "stable" release

[stere0]

Being "stuck with whatever software versions Debian freezes on for a couple years", as you say it, is actually a Good Thing(tm).

If I install a web server, I want it to run something stable, trusted and tested, something I don't have to apt-get upgrade;apt-get dist-upgrade with untested packages every morning. My Potatoes haven't caused any problems since the day I installed them. I eventually have to upgrade some packages when security holes are discovered, but that's ok. There is nothing I need on a production box that isn't included in potato. (Well, maybe a cowsay package would be nice ;))

Re:That's the whole purpose of a "stable" release

[noahm]

Being "stuck with whatever software versions Debian freezes on for a couple years", as you say it, is actually a Good Thing(tm).

It can be a good thing, for sure, but at some point there's a tradeoff that must be made between stability and usability. For most of the basic internet services (web, mail, DNS), development has reached a certain point of maturity, and you really don't lose much by running a 2 year old release of sendmail or BIND (provided you have all necessary security updates, which Debian makes easy).

The problem is, though, once you start leaving that realm of the world, upstream development happens at a really fast pace, and Debian's release cycle does not keep up. I often cite GNOME in slink (Debian 2.1) as an example of this problem. Slink shipped with GNOME 0.3, which you may recall was virtually unusable and was certainly not stable. The most frustrating part of that, though, was that by the time slink actually shipped, GNOME 1.0 had been out for months! How can slink be considered stable when the software that comprises it is an old development snapshot?

A more current example may be apache 2. It is still not available for Debian (even in unstable), which leads one to suspect that it won't ship with woody. If it doesn't, then what happens to those users who need apache 2 functionality on mission critical servers? If they need to run unstable to get the software they need, then that defeats the point of stable. If they need to fetch the source and compile apache 2 outside of the Debian package system, then that defeats the point of apt-get.

IMHO, it is unacceptable for Debian to not currently have a stable release that includes PERL 5.6, XFree86 4.x, Linux 2.4.x, etc. What prevented the release manager from proclaiming a freeze 6 or 8 months ago? Newer versions of key packages were available and reasonably well tested at that point, and a 1 or two month freeze would have left us with a released version of Debian that was both stable and reasonably up to date.

One of the key problems, I believe, is that Debian does not use any notion of release goals. This makes it impossible to say for certain when a freeze should happen. It's entirely up to the release manager. Obviously it's not easy to have release goals for a distribution, since much of the software you want to package is not available when drafting the list of goals, but even some sort of vague, general release goals would help to provide focus.

Or maybe the problem is just that nobody actually wants to do QA debugging so they keep putting it off until the release manager gets fed up and stops allowing new features to be added until some bugs are fixed.

I don't know...I've been a Debian user for 5 years and a developer for about a year. I am very frustrated with the pace of the release cycle. Another OS I use regularly (FreeBSD, which I use at work) shares Debian's reputation for quality and stability, but they release at least two versions of their OS each year. They've released three versions since Debian released potato. Why can't we do that?

noah

Re:That's the whole purpose of a "stable" release

[phaethon]

> ... what happens to those users who need apache 2 functionality on mission critical servers?

echo deb-src http://kabuki.sfarc.net/apache2 / >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get -b source apache2
dpkg -i *.deb

I've just done this on a potato system. It works just fine. Well, I've build perl and debhelper from woody to meet the build depencies. You can get bleeding edge software with debian! Just build it from debian source packages and they integrate well with the packaging system.

-Jade.

Re:That's the whole purpose of a "stable" release

[noahm]

echo deb-src http://kabuki.sfarc.net/apache2 / >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get -b source apache2
dpkg -i *.deb

Yes, that certainly helps, but it can only take you so far. That's really no better than building Apache 2 completely outside the Debian package database and using 'equivs' to create a dummy entry in the package database. You don't get the advantage of easy apt-gettable upgrades, and you don't get security support. You also are at the mercy of build environment changes between distributions.

noah

Re:That's the whole purpose of a "stable" release

[joib]

As you hinted at, I think debian has a lot to learn from *BSD regarding release management in the sense that the bsd:s have succeeded in producing stable up-to-date distributions on multiple platforms on a volunteer basis. My solution would be that at the same time as a new stable is released, unstable is forked into the new testing, where the freeze process begins _immidiately_, i.e. first get the base system functional, then freeze it, then the same thing for the rest of the system and voilá, a new stable release! This would avoid the two big problems with the current system, i.e. packages trickling _veeery_ slowly into testing from unstable (e.g. mozilla, gnome 1.4 etc.) and "creeping featurism/arbitrary release goals" (lets just wait for feature X before we freeze!). But of course, I'm not the debian release manager (or whoever decides these things) so I'm just ranting...:(

Re:That's the whole purpose of a "stable" release

[clementw]

one of the reasons i switched back to redhat was that packages moved very slowly through the debian system. i just check on gnucash at debian.org and for the stable and testing it lists 1.3.4 as the version available with testing at 1.6.4 and when i check at gnucash.org i see that 1.6.0 was released 10-6-01 over 4 months ago and yet a serch of packages at debian.org does not even show 1.4 for the stable release. is it stable or stagnent??

Re:That's the whole purpose of a "stable" release

[mmontour]

I really like the OpenBSD "Patch Branch" - a CVS branch that contains security fixes and other "safe" changes, but not all the new development junk. Just a "cvs update -rOPENBSD_2_9 -Pd" to freshen /usr/src, then rebuild. There are even targets to re-build a complete set of installation files incorporating all the patches.

It's really nice to build a fully patched version of the OS, then upload it to a local FTP server (for network installs) or burn it onto a CD. That way you can install new servers *once*, as opposed to installing the base OS then manually upgrading the dozen or so packages that have critical bugs.

(I don't know how Debian compares to OpenBSD here; I haven't tried Debian since I had some pain with the installer a few years ago. But OpenBSD's really nice; just wish it had SMP and a few other goodies).

Re:Where's the equivalent of the Slash we once kne

[Anonymous Coward]

And the killer app is web browsing, not email, and that came from Portugal

No it didn't. That came from Switzerland.

Debian GNU/FreeBSD

[shao]

Debian is the only way that make linux does not suck.

Now, all I want is a Debian version of FreeBSD!!!

Re: Debian GNU/FreeBSD

[dne]

Why?

Re: Debian GNU/FreeBSD

[mrbnsn]

Why? Because, frankly, in core features (scheduling, VM, I/O, stability, etc.), the FreeBSD kernel is much better than the Linux kernel.

However, the flip side is that the FreeBSD kernel is an ancient, unthreaded, monolithic kernel with lagging device support, and non-existent ISV support.

So, if you don't need to run Java or other closed-source third-party software, and don't need the latest PCCARD or USB dongle, run FreeBSD. Otherwise, run Linux. A Debian environment built on top of the FreeBSD kernel would greatly facilitate switching back and forth as circumstances required.

who gives a fuck about apache?

[posmon]

just run iis under wine. you'll be laughing!

Your post is proof...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that Slashdot is full of clueless half wits.

who cares? Just run Redhat..

[Anonymous Coward]

Redhat works just fine on the 150 webservers my company runs. Never cracked, never crashed, and never rebooted except for kernel upgrades.

I look at it this way: If Debian is the preferred linux distribution of Slashdot morons, then it must suck.

RPM is really easy to work with, and rolling our own custom RPMs is a piece of cake.

Fuck Debian Bloatware.

Apache and Mozilla et al?

[sketerpot]

Surely they can put things like Apache and Mozilla in a special "Mostly harmless" directory or something. It would be a tragedy to see a linux distro ship without things like these.

Re:Apache and Mozilla et al?

[Anonymous Coward]

As others have said, this is just a call to arms, but there is a "mostly harmless" system already. The Debian system is broken into three branches - stable (perfect), testing (mostly harmless, you'll usually find the latest KDE here), and unstable (definitely issues, or just brand new).

And this is why Mandrake 8.1's getting a rude surprise soon (I'm sick and tired of things not working)

Debian's standard of quality

[PurpleBob]

It's good to see that Debian is maintaining their quality even when rushed. Making threats like this is one way to accomplish that - saying to maintainers with broken patches, "if you don't submit a patch, the release will suck and it will be ALL YOUR FAULT".

And I'm frankly amazed they got Mozilla in in the first place - they hadn't since M18, and with no packaged version Mozilla it was practically impossible to install Galeon.

Re:Debian's standard of quality

[CentrX]

There's always been a version of mozilla in there, it's just been M18 the whole time. I'm not amazed that mozilla 0.9.x got in, because that's something that I'm sure a lot of people have been saying is important, so it's been looked at more closely.

svgalib1?

[suss]

This happened to me after an apt-get upgrade last week:

zgv: relocation error: /usr/lib/libc5-compat/libvga.so.1: undefined symbol: _xstat

I cant find anything in http://bugs.debian.org and i've only found 1 message about it in muc.lists.debian.user... does this mean svgalib1 is going to be removed or what?

Re:svgalib1?

[Whelkman]

Oh man libc5 is old. Why don't you use svgalibg1?

Re:svgalib1?

[suss]

Oh man libc5 is old. Why don't you use svgalibg1?

I didn't choose any lib, the packages do. I apt-get everything, don't build it myself. Stuff like this seems to happen quite often in Debian/Woody, i remember login and telnet not working for weeks a while ago. Also, lilo broke on the last upgrade on another box i use (also Debian/Woody). Fun all around....

Re:svgalib1?

[kubrick]

This happened to me after an apt-get upgrade last week:

zgv: relocation error: /usr/lib/libc5-compat/libvga.so.1: undefined symbol: _xstat

I managed to fix this by commenting out /usr/lib/libc5-compat and /lib/libc5-compat
in /etc/ld.so.conf, and then re-running ldconfig (all this as root).

Of course, if I find anything on my box that's been linked against libc5, I'll run into problems -- but I've been fine so far. Hopefully this is just a problem with the svgalib packages that will be fixed by a recompile.

There's probably a better solution, but I couldn't find it :)

Re:svgalib1?

[suss]

Hm. now zgv segfaults. ohwell...

Hopefully this is just a problem with the svgalib packages that will be fixed by a recompile.

I came upon some vague message about this happening when incompatible versions of gcc are being used?

Re:svgalib1?

[kubrick]

Well, at least it's in the BTS now -- #121142.

The only solution at the moment is to downgrade -- and it seems like a linking problem (linked with libc6 instead of libc5 on compile).

Re:svgalib1?

[kubrick]

BTW, maybe try a couple of other packages that use svgalib and see if the problem is there or in zgv. If they act up as well, zgv is not to blame :)

Re:svgalib1?

[suss]

Well bugger... i've downgraded svgalib1, svgalibg1 and svgalib-bin to 1.4.1-2 and i it's still linked to libc6. Do i need to run something afterwards? To quote dr mccoy: "Damned Jim, i'm a user, not a package-juggler!"

Re:svgalib1?

[kubrick]

Ummm... try running ldconfig again as root. This will regenerate the ld.so.cache file, which stores all of the libraries' linking details.

That's the only help I can offer -- I'm only a user as well, I ain't got no serious Debian mojo going on :)

(Maybe you'd need to downgrade zgv as well? I don't know about that. Probably not... but if the above fails then give it a try.)

Let me know how you get on -- if it works I might downgrade as well :) (The commenting things out in ld.so.conf worked for me, and zgv didn't segfault -- there's one segfaulting bug in the BTS against zgv that was blamed on svgalib as well, so maybe you ran into that.)

Re:svgalib1?

[suss]

Ummm... try running ldconfig again as root. This will regenerate the ld.so.cache file, which stores all of the libraries' linking details.

Yeah, i already did that... wasn't the problem though; when i downgraded the symlink to libvga.so.1 wasnt updated and was still pointing to the newer version. Once i corrected it, zgv started working again! Now let's see how long it takes before there's a proper solution...

Re:Where's the equivalent of the Slash we once kne

[Anonymous Coward]

Quit taking credit for the internet and, for god's sake, MAKE YOUR WOMEN START SHAVING THEIR PITS!!!

Re:Where's the equivalent of the Slash we once kne

[Anonymous Coward]

You illiterate moron. The first nodes weren't any damn where but in higher education and military installation in the United States because the US funded it and created it.

And they say education has declined in the States- it seems that's a problem all over. Oh that's right, there's no real education to speak of in Africa in the first place.

Beyond Woody?

[Trevelyan]

I like most people i know have my sources.list entries all pointing to 'testing'. So when woody moves "down" to stable, we'll all be getting a new dist.

I know SID stays at unstable so what will the new dists (or Debian 4) be called?
and when/how will this work do we stay with woody till a new testing branch is ready or will we be inline with SID for a bit?

I dont realy care about what goes into stable it packages are just too old for a desktop (great for servers and production sys) I am very interested in hearing about the next debian, beyond woody.

Re:Beyond Woody?

[PlazMatiC]

When sid was released, I was using woody, and had 'unstable' in my sources.list line. I ran my regular apt-get upgrade, and lo and behold, I suddenly had sid, without asking for it.

This was a concern at first, but sid hasn't given me any major problems.

In response to your question, when potato moved out of unstable, it went to frozen, then to stable. Woody was released as the new unstable dist very shortly afterwards, iirc.

Re:Beyond Woody?

[Anonymous Coward]

Woody will be released as Debian 2.3. The name of the next version has not been officially released yet, and will not be revealed until time draws near for the branch to actually be opened, but Sarge seems to be a popular choice. Will that be the name? I don't know.

Sarge (or whatever name is decided upon) is probably going to be released as Debian 3.0 instead of 2.4. I believe it's been officially stated as such, but things can change. Versions aren't given numbers until they are actually released as Stable distros, so the branch will be open for a long long time before it gets a version number.

Re:Where's the equivalent of the Slash we once kne

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, hahah, life on the internet began in Africa...
hmm, more like in the defense networks of the United States.
The internet is an American network extended to the rest of the world, not the other way around.

Re:Where's the equivalent of the Slash we once kne

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, Slashdot has been in a downward spiral of suckiness practically since I first discovered the place. Roblimo's 'geek Guide to Women' really took the cake as far as Bullshit posted o Slashdot by the editors (the readers' responses were even more pathetically sucky).
I can't believe people actually bother to try to have rational discussion here. At least some of the space has been reclaimed from troll-crapflooder-bullshit posts, but what passes for intelligent conversation is nothing of the sort. ZDNet is the only forum I know of where what people have to say is even stupider than Slashdot.
I can't believe so many people still come here! Hell, I can't believe I still bother to come here. Somehow, the aura of slashdot is big in my heart, though it is such a useless website from the editors on down. However, somhow, 'The News Slashdot Posts' is an important thing to me. Hmmph.
kuro5hin was okay, unitl it turned into post 9/11 sobbing and social analysis. OS News is cool. LinuxToday is okay. Try searching ezboard. or, um, hell, I don't know.

Question

[Tachys]

When was Debian 2.2 first released?

Dumbass.

[Anonymous Coward]

When sid was released, I was using woody, and had 'unstable' in my sources.list line. I ran my regular apt-get upgrade, and lo and behold, I suddenly had sid, without asking for it.

If you wanted to stay with the same version, you should have used the name of the version in your sources.list, rather than the name of the branch. If you use "woody" in your sources.list, you'll always have woody. If you use "unstable", you'll always have the current unstable version.

Re:Dumbass.

[PlazMatiC]

Erm, I wanted to stick with the dist that was heading towards becoming stable.

Sid, on the other hand, is never going to become stable, so the overall stability of the distibution is never going to change. Sure, individual packages will be fixed, but there'll always be problems.

I would be happy about having a problematic distribution for a while, that was going to improve over time. I didn't realise that they were going to make the change. I personally think they would have been better leaving unstable as it was, and giving the new branch a new name.

Just my 2c, anyway.

Woody / 2.2r4 testing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone explain whether 2.2r4-testing and 3.0 are (approximately) the same?