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How Debian Almost Failed to Elect a Project Leader (lwn.net)
Five candidates now are running to be Debian's project leader for the coming year. But earlier this week, Slashdot reader Seven Spirals shared LWN's story about what a difficult election it's been:
This year, the call for nominations was duly sent out by project secretary Kurt Roeckx on March 3. But, as of March 10, no eligible candidates had put their names forward... There is nobody there to do any campaigning.
This being Debian, the constitution naturally describes what is to happen in this situation: the nomination period is extended for another week... Should this deadline also pass without candidates, it will be extended for another week; this loop will repeat indefinitely until somebody gives in and submits their name... In the absence of a project leader, the chair of the technical committee and the project secretary are empowered to make decisions -- as long as they are able to agree on what those decisions should be. Since Debian developers are famously an agreeable and non-argumentative bunch, there should be no problem with that aspect of things...
One might well wonder, though, why there seems to be nobody who wants to take the helm of this project for a year. The fact that it is an unpaid position requiring a lot of time and travel might have something to do with it. If that were indeed to prove to be part of the problem, Debian might eventually have to consider doing what a number of similar organizations have done and create a paid position to do this work.
This being Debian, the constitution naturally describes what is to happen in this situation: the nomination period is extended for another week... Should this deadline also pass without candidates, it will be extended for another week; this loop will repeat indefinitely until somebody gives in and submits their name... In the absence of a project leader, the chair of the technical committee and the project secretary are empowered to make decisions -- as long as they are able to agree on what those decisions should be. Since Debian developers are famously an agreeable and non-argumentative bunch, there should be no problem with that aspect of things...
One might well wonder, though, why there seems to be nobody who wants to take the helm of this project for a year. The fact that it is an unpaid position requiring a lot of time and travel might have something to do with it. If that were indeed to prove to be part of the problem, Debian might eventually have to consider doing what a number of similar organizations have done and create a paid position to do this work.
From the same dipshit group that voted for systemd by default.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Remember when the Debian founder got arrested, tweeted "The N-Word", and killed himself all in one weekend? Rad times.
Remember when John killed a man and had sex with underage hookers? Oh wait, the two weren't connected by anything but name. kys
Seriously, not kidding.
They've certainly failed to integrate a robust init system.
Whether you like or hate systemd, it must be a pain to deal with all the drama and hate surrounding it when all you want to do is put out a decent distro. I am sure there are people saying, "You don't install systemd on the bios in Debian? Dumbasses!" Who wants to deal with that kind of negativity?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
seriously people, couldn't one of you have stepped up, run unopposed and chucked that shit into the toilet?
Remember this situation next time you want to complain about a CEO's salary. While many salaries may be excessive, you will not get a CEO to work for the same salary (or anything close) as regular employees, for similar kinds of reasons.
I for one just hope they had the good sense not to vote for somebody orange.
Another way to look at it is that the position is an excellent opportunity, especially for someone who is involved with Open Source ecosystem studies or something similar. Imagine having the position of DPL on your résumé (CV)!
I don't understand why this is such a bad issue. Anyway, what does the Debian family do with all the money they earn from selling the Linux CDs?
Debian, because of that utterly unusable, unworkable, and unreliable systemd garbage, can't even resolve hostnames on localdomain. And, it literally can't be fixed.
That's why Debian and all of it's evil spawn need to be relegated to the annals of abject failure along with SCO and Bitcoin.
Hey, it sounds like a paid position is actually on the table -- but only if nobody volunteers. This is just the year everyone decided to hold out for a better offer.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Comparing "man showpath" with "man traceroute", we find that showpath can do a lot less than traceroute can - it has far fewer options.
One might also notice that unlike traceroute, showpath tries a bunch of ports and hopes - the results of showpath might be similar to reality, the results are often right, often not. Traceroute uses one and the results it provides are correct. (Or in case of error, traceroute indicates an error, as opposed to false results).
So by now I'm sure you see why traceroute had to be replaced by showpath - to make it dumber and less reliable.
Actually the best I can tell, those who wanted to replace traceroute never bothered to check the docs after they heard about a "problem" with tracert which doesn't actually exist. The excuse for getting rid of traceroute is that "you have to be root to run traceroute", but that simply isn't true. There are in fact TWO different ways that non-root users can run traceroute. Like ping, normally it's installed setuid, which allows any user to run a small program as if they were root. You wouldn't want large, complex programs to run setuid in case of security bugs in them, but for small, simple programs it's fine. If you don't want to set it setuid, any user can still run it and it'll do the same udp trick that showpath does. Showpath is literally a small subset of traceroute's functionality. It's not so much replacing one with another, but rather "take away all of the most commonly used options for traceroute and leave only showpath remaining". Genius.
The main purpose of systemd -- beyond being an init system [...]
This is the problem right here. This.
init.d may have sucked, and systemd may have been a better system, but expanding it beyond that was just fucking stupid.
Or, if you want to "improve" other components of an OS, make them loosely coupled to your init system. Fucking journald which (a) does not have an ACID file format, and (b) can't send logging to a remote system so I still have to run rsyslogd on my servers anyway is a case in point.
Works like Debian without the systemd.
https://devuan.org/
And by diverse, I mean 5 white dudes with various hair lengths and presence of facial hair. How's that Outreachy program that the SPI contributes Debian funds to going?
You may be able to to run ping and traceroute without being root by typing "/usr/sbin/ping" or "/use/sbin/traceroute".
Use "which traceroute" to find out if it's in sbin, which won't be in the PATH for a normal user.
Ping and traceroute used to use raw sockets by default, which isn't allowed for normal users. Now it uses UDP by default so non-root users can use it (with the full path if needed).
Current traceroute has the"-I" option to use old-style icmp. It's often installed setuid, meaning normal users can run it even with -I and it behaves as though they were root. You can check with:
ll /usr/sbin/ping /usr/sbin/ping
Which may return:
-r-s--x--x 1 root bin 40960 Aug 24 1998
The "s" means it is set uid.
So you can:
Use the full path and it will probably work (using UDP).
Use -I to traceroute any host you can ping, if it's setuid or you are root.
Showpath does away with these choices and just does udp only, which often works fine.
How about a job share? Ajit Pai and Boris Johnson.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."