and aptitude (just a few minutes ago, in fact), and i like dselect better that either. I miss the info displays; the sorting by availability, priority, and name; the hold feature; the ability to undo mark-for-(un)install without resetting everything; indication of obsolete packages.
Aptitude author speaking.
Part of the reason that you don't see some of the features you mention is that I'm working on things in approximate inverse order of difficulty. Most of what you mentioned (except for the undo feature) is almost trivial to add, so I haven't yet:). But I believe that I have info screens (latest version, press Enter); I have grouping but not by priority yet (I consider that a dselect misfeatures, but the grouping order will become configurable, hopefully within two versions) -- so that's a legitimate complaint; hold definitely works (you can hit '-' on a package that's being upgraded or just hit '=' anywhere); undo is another thing I really want, and obsolete packages should actually be fairly easy to check for with the right APT magic. In fact, I think I'll go add that now. Expect it today or tomorrow in the 0.0.5 release.
Wait for the official potato release -- the boot-floppies are still in progress (do they even work right now?) I think 'base via http' is going to be in the final version if it's humanly possible, from what I've heard on the list:)
A startup company named RedHat has announced that it is shipping a new distribution of the Linux operating system. For unknown reasons, it has chosen to number this version 6.0. Sun Microsystems, a new contender from Palo Alto, California, has released a hitherto unseen operating system, Solaris. And finally, a dark horse company named Microsoft in the city of Redmond, California, has announced that it will soon be releasing an operating system known as "Windows", with versions starting at 2000.
Daniel PS - apologies if you didn't mean what I thought you meant:)
(Disclaimer: I'm not a Debian developer; I just hang out on the mailing lists and in the new-maintainer queue..)
There are two things to note:
First, this isn't an official "Debian strategy", although many users end up doing it; in fact, it's a periodic occurance on debian-devel for someone to start a huge thread predicting the End Of The World As We Know It[tm] due to the slow release schedule, and for just about everyone else to agree that things need to speed up. There are several proposals to restructure the archives and make it easier to cut new releases more often; it looks like (I believe) they'll be in place before Woody.
Second, this isn't as much of a problem as you think, as long as you aren't being charged for modem time and/or bandwidth. I've tracked unstable for long periods of time over a modem. The trick is to set up a cronjob to download stuff in the middle of the night. Also, if you want to use less bandwidth, you can download less frequently than once a day (say, once every week or two) or upgrade individual packages that you want a newer version of.
It'd be nice to have one language with extensions that are reasonable, and understandable.
Well, there's Python:-) Seriously, I believe that is one of its design goals, and having learned it I can say that it is (a) very easy to learn without sacrificing power (aside from the flexibility/speed tradeoff you make with an interpreted language, but that's not really a power issue persay; you could even say it's more powerful for some things), and (b) highly extensible -- everything is provided via objects and modules, and I mean *everything* -- files and strings are objects, all routines for string manipulation, regex searching, and so on, are in modules, etc.
Of course, the only thing I use it for these days is writing automatic mailhandlers (it has excellent mail-parsing facilities) -- mainly because I don't run into much stuff where I need Python's capabilities. Go figure:)
Daniel
PS - while Python is nice, many computer languages is a **GOOD THING**. Having a language that more closely models the problem -- for example, being able to use a functional language like Lisp or ML -- makes things a lot simpler and faster. More languages means more choices. End rant.:)
You should give w3m a shot as well. lynx is nice -- I used it for a while -- but w3m, combined with low available resources, knocked Netscape out of the picture on my computer. It renders tables and frames exactly as they'd appear in a graphical browser (except, of course, that the pictures aren't present), makes it easy to view an inline image, and supports mousing in an xterm. I'm sure it does more that I'm not thinking of:)
The only real problem with w3m is that it's sometimes unstable and/or has odd/inconsistent responses..mainly due to the fact that it's still in development. But most of these are minor annoyances (for example, the context menu is entirely broken) and don't interfere with browsing.
How does does implementing a tool in a scripted language make it eaiser for newcomers to learn and use? Well, I assume that they'll allow Python code in the control files themselves, the same way Makefiles allow sh code and autoconf allows m4 code. Writing the tool in the interpreted language makes this easier -- I suppose you could try to optimize by writing most of the code in C, then providing Python-visible hooks and calling the interpreter as appropriate; this might be less useful than you'd think, though. My inclination would be to write only the dependency-resolution stuff in C -- nothing else seems likely to be time-critical. Anyway, back to the reason to choose Python (as opposed to other scripting languages) -- Python is actually more common than you might think, it's not that hard [1] to install, and it's sane. Daniel [1] I'm assuming you're willing to use binary packages; for example, the Debian ones..
If you make a copy, that is theft - pure and simple Uh, no, if I steal something, that is theft. If I copy something, that is copyright infringement, perhaps, unless it falls under fair-use or the other (vanishing under lobbying pressure) loopholes for individuals and personal use. If I copy something and then redistribute it, this is almost certainly unauthorized redistribution unless you have given me permission. Further, all of the above are legal (although perhaps incorrect, IANAL and so on) terms; you appear to be dangerously close to conflating legality and morality. I don't always agree with the speed limit in a particular zone, but I generally follow it (unless I'm making a traffic hazard of myself by being the only person driving less than 20 miles an hour over it, but anyway..); similarly, I probably have pirated far less material even than you have, but I can still think that the current enforcement of copyright law (and perhaps the law itself) is dumb and has more to do with financial and political power than with morals or ethics. Please keep your terms and realms of reasoning separate and clear; it makes it so much easier to have rational discussions instead of namecalling. Thanks, Daniel
As far as I can see, the UCITA, despite all the hype I've heard about it, changes nothing. Here are the major poison pills in it: -> Prohibition of reverse engineering. This changes nothing. Reverse engineering is already illegal here (the US) as far as I know, and de facto illegal just about anywhere. Even if there is no legal merit to an attack, anyone who successfully reverse engineers something can expect to be subjected to a barrage of legal harassment, court cases, and extreme negative publicity, and to incur either huge legal fees, huge penalties (if they lose), or both (references that come to mind: various video game emulators (N64, for example), DeCSS) -> Shrink-wrap licenses Again, as far as I know these are already binding; the only thing that saves us is that the megacorporations that make software don't bother leaning on individuals when leaning on other corporations is more profitable (since with most software it's almost physically impossible to simultaneously use the software in any useful way and obey the license agreement) If they might not be legally binding, see the note for reverse engineering -- I know I can't afford to get hit with a lawsuit, whether it has legal merit or not. -> The example given above -- buying Word and a book -- is true even today, without the UCITA. -> I don't think it's possible to return software even today. One of the points in the above article was that the terms of the license can be presented after the software was bought; this is already common practice. If you think this invalidates the license, see my note on shrink-wraps and lawsuits. -> Computer companies already charge ridiculous amounts for support or don't even bother. Computer programs are already shipped with piles of bugs (Win9x anyone)
In sum, the UCITA is nothing other than a statement of existing laws and practices. That it sounds so terrible is more a reflection on the ethics and techniques of the proprietary software industry it covers than on the proposal itself.
Just what I've always wanted! Transparent dialog boxes so I can clutter my screen up with windows in front of *and* behind what I'm working on! Great! Clearly a giant stride forwards in technology and interface design! This does answer one question, though. When the G4 was released, I wondered: "Well, Apple has an incredibly powerful CPU, and they're working on an operating system that can actually use it (instead of blocking everything to poll the network card, for example). Now, it would be un-Apple to actually make this available to the user. Wonder how they'll burn all those extra cycles? Chrome, I bet." And I was right! Daniel
Uh, TTL is essentially number of hops in v4, since it gets decremented once a second or whenever a hop occurs, whichever happens first..and hops are almost always less than a second long. Traceroute, in fact, depends on this behavior.
what characteristics of full-color images makes them especially susceptible to wavelet compression, versus say, a text file or an executable binary? I'd guess perhaps the fact that it's OK to perform lossy compression on an image, and that people see image compression as 'good' if most of the main image features are there (that is, good enough that a human observer won't immediately notice a difference). You wouldn't be too happy, I suspect, if you decompressed a text file and found that gzip had trimmed it down to something resembling Cliff Notes:)
Given the success that projects like Linux, KDE and Gnome have shown using a completely opposite strategy, we have every reason to believe that such a model would work better. Do you know, that's possibly the worst logical fallacy I've heard all week? Unless you think you've demonstrated something actually wrong with XFree's current model.
If moderation extended to articles I'd mark this one down Score -1: Flamebait. Not necessarily because it's inflammatory in and of itself (although the last comment was practically asking the soapboxers to come out of the woodwork), but because we've all seen this ground hashed over again, again, and again: "BSD license sucks! Disinfect the GPV! BSD==Proprietary! GPL==Commie Facists! BSD users are elitist jerks! Linux users are clueless idiots! BSD is k00l! Linux is k00l!" I've browsed the first few comments and found that, unsurprisingly, they say nothing that hasn't already been repeated ad nauseum. I'd like to ask/. to try for a little more discretion in posting articles and to try to cut a little of the hype and bullbaiting. Not that the odds are in favor of this occuring.. Luck, Daniel
Re:The road to hell ...
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 1
Actually, you're wrong. It's paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen. Daniel (in case you were totally lost there, this is an obscure reference to the novel _Good Omens_. I'm not totally insane. Yet. Offtopic, maybe. But not insane. No. Not insane)
I'm not sure it will work in a large-scale project. Well, much of Emacs is (as far as I know..) written in Lisp. Is that large-scale enough for you? There's also Sawmill, which is a window-manager written mostly in Lisp, with C for the lowlevel routines. Daniel
Uhh, OpenBSD didn't 'write' OpenSSH, they went back to the last version of SSH that had a free license and then backported all necessary security fixes. Aside from that, you're right:)
Indeed. That's a feature. Fine. I've given up trying to argue with you about whether that's a good idea. What I'm saying is that the text of the license implies, to me, that the proprietary software company should not be allowed to do what you want to allow them to do, and I think you should try to find a better wording for that sentence:) More specifically, I think that saying that you must not prevent others from "doing the same" implies that you must not prevent others from copying *the program*, and I think that *the program* refers to the program in all its forms -- that it, the program and any future versions of it. What I'd suggest is saying something like: "You may use, modify, and distribute this software as you please, with any restrictions that you like, so long as you do not attempt to prevent others from acquiring the program from another source and doing likewise" I understand that it's not quite as concise as your version, but it's much harder to misunderstand. This is really drifting into the esoteric realm of semantics, though.:) Daniel
Come now. You're smarter than that. Please explain to me how someone is going to sell this software now? The line you quoted was referring to the right to use the software; you claimed that the GNU license forbids you to use software in conjunction with proprietary libraries, which is false. Admittedly you can't redistribute the result if you've linked the code in, but this might be fine for some purposes. If you're really intent on it, I suspect you could distribute your modifications as patches. Anyway, I'd like to kill this thread, as we're obviously all too stubborn to change positions. I suspect you're going to try to get the last word in, though:-) Luck, Daniel
"do not prevent anyone from doing the same" is quite easily misinterpreted as "do not deny these rights to other people" That's not a misinterpretation. That's exactly what it means.
Excuse me? You just gone done telling me how happy you were that someone could take your code and relicense it as proprietary software. If you want things that way, that's fine, but the proprietary company is clearly preventing the users from doing what they did to that copy of the software. (yes, in theory the users could still get it from you, but I still maintain that the proprietary company violated your license as written -- and they could still get it even if that clause weren't there) So I still think that the cause is superfluous and confusing -- if not, you should clarify what you mean a little.
I'm not going to argue about the GPL any more, it's clear that no-one's going to change his or her mind so we're just wasting breath, which is a fairly precious resource:)
RedHat also sells support and various other merchandise, and manages to turn a profit. Actually...they don't. Not that it bothers me, since I don't own any RHAT:)
Slashdot Mirror
I think the current plan is to try to get this working while woody is unstable.
Daniel
and aptitude (just a few minutes ago, in fact), and i like dselect better that either. I miss the info displays; the sorting by availability, priority, and name; the hold feature; the ability to undo mark-for-(un)install without resetting everything; indication of obsolete packages.
:). But I believe that I have info screens (latest version, press Enter); I have grouping but not by priority yet (I consider that a dselect misfeatures, but the grouping order will become configurable, hopefully within two versions) -- so that's a legitimate complaint; hold definitely works (you can hit '-' on a package that's being upgraded or just hit '=' anywhere); undo is another thing I really want, and obsolete packages should actually be fairly easy to check for with the right APT magic. In fact, I think I'll go add that now. Expect it today or tomorrow in the 0.0.5 release.
Aptitude author speaking.
Part of the reason that you don't see some of the features you mention is that I'm working on things in approximate inverse order of difficulty. Most of what you mentioned (except for the undo feature) is almost trivial to add, so I haven't yet
Daniel
does anyone know of a decent pointy clicky or curses info viewer?)
:-)
pinfo. It made me like info pages
Daniel
Wait for the official potato release -- the boot-floppies are still in progress (do they even work right now?) I think 'base via http' is going to be in the final version if it's humanly possible, from what I've heard on the list :)
Daniel
A startup company named RedHat has announced that it is shipping a new distribution of the Linux operating system. For unknown reasons, it has chosen to number this version 6.0.
:)
Sun Microsystems, a new contender from Palo Alto, California, has released a hitherto unseen operating system, Solaris.
And finally, a dark horse company named Microsoft in the city of Redmond, California, has announced that it will soon be releasing an operating system known as "Windows", with versions starting at 2000.
Daniel
PS - apologies if you didn't mean what I thought you meant
(Disclaimer: I'm not a Debian developer; I just hang out on the mailing lists and in the new-maintainer queue..)
There are two things to note:
First, this isn't an official "Debian strategy", although many users end up doing it; in fact, it's a periodic occurance on debian-devel for someone to start a huge thread predicting the End Of The World As We Know It[tm] due to the slow release schedule, and for just about everyone else to agree that things need to speed up. There are several proposals to restructure the archives and make it easier to cut new releases more often; it looks like (I believe) they'll be in place before Woody.
Second, this isn't as much of a problem as you think, as long as you aren't being charged for modem time and/or bandwidth. I've tracked unstable for long periods of time over a modem. The trick is to set up a cronjob to download stuff in the middle of the night. Also, if you want to use less bandwidth, you can download less frequently than once a day (say, once every week or two) or upgrade individual packages that you want a newer version of.
Daniel
It'd be nice to have one language with extensions that are reasonable, and understandable.
:-) Seriously, I believe that is one of its design goals, and having learned it I can say that it is (a) very easy to learn without sacrificing power (aside from the flexibility/speed tradeoff you make with an interpreted language, but that's not really a power issue persay; you could even say it's more powerful for some things), and (b) highly extensible -- everything is provided via objects and modules, and I mean *everything* -- files and strings are objects, all routines for string manipulation, regex searching, and so on, are in modules, etc.
:)
:)
Well, there's Python
Of course, the only thing I use it for these days is writing automatic mailhandlers (it has excellent mail-parsing facilities) -- mainly because I don't run into much stuff where I need Python's capabilities. Go figure
Daniel
PS - while Python is nice, many computer languages is a **GOOD THING**. Having a language that more closely models the problem -- for example, being able to use a functional language like Lisp or ML -- makes things a lot simpler and faster. More languages means more choices. End rant.
You should give w3m a shot as well. lynx is nice -- I used it for a while -- but w3m, combined with low available resources, knocked Netscape out of the picture on my computer. It renders tables and frames exactly as they'd appear in a graphical browser (except, of course, that the pictures aren't present), makes it easy to view an inline image, and supports mousing in an xterm. I'm sure it does more that I'm not thinking of :)
The only real problem with w3m is that it's sometimes unstable and/or has odd/inconsistent responses..mainly due to the fact that it's still in development. But most of these are minor annoyances (for example, the context menu is entirely broken) and don't interfere with browsing.
Daniel
How does does implementing a tool in a scripted language make it eaiser for newcomers to learn and use?
Well, I assume that they'll allow Python code in the control files themselves, the same way Makefiles allow sh code and autoconf allows m4 code. Writing the tool in the interpreted language makes this easier -- I suppose you could try to optimize by writing most of the code in C, then providing Python-visible hooks and calling the interpreter as appropriate; this might be less useful than you'd think, though. My inclination would be to write only the dependency-resolution stuff in C -- nothing else seems likely to be time-critical.
Anyway, back to the reason to choose Python (as opposed to other scripting languages) -- Python is actually more common than you might think, it's not that hard [1] to install, and it's sane.
Daniel
[1] I'm assuming you're willing to use binary packages; for example, the Debian ones..
You think people don't?
Daniel
If you make a copy, that is theft - pure and simple
Uh, no, if I steal something, that is theft. If I copy something, that is copyright infringement, perhaps, unless it falls under fair-use or the other (vanishing under lobbying pressure) loopholes for individuals and personal use. If I copy something and then redistribute it, this is almost certainly unauthorized redistribution unless you have given me permission.
Further, all of the above are legal (although perhaps incorrect, IANAL and so on) terms; you appear to be dangerously close to conflating legality and morality. I don't always agree with the speed limit in a particular zone, but I generally follow it (unless I'm making a traffic hazard of myself by being the only person driving less than 20 miles an hour over it, but anyway..); similarly, I probably have pirated far less material even than you have, but I can still think that the current enforcement of copyright law (and perhaps the law itself) is dumb and has more to do with financial and political power than with morals or ethics.
Please keep your terms and realms of reasoning separate and clear; it makes it so much easier to have rational discussions instead of namecalling.
Thanks,
Daniel
As far as I can see, the UCITA, despite all the hype I've heard about it, changes nothing. Here are the major poison pills in it:
-> Prohibition of reverse engineering.
This changes nothing. Reverse engineering is already illegal here (the US) as far as I know, and de facto illegal just about anywhere. Even if there is no legal merit to an attack, anyone who successfully reverse engineers something can expect to be subjected to a barrage of legal harassment, court cases, and extreme negative publicity, and to incur either huge legal fees, huge penalties (if they lose), or both (references that come to mind: various video game emulators (N64, for example), DeCSS)
-> Shrink-wrap licenses
Again, as far as I know these are already binding; the only thing that saves us is that the megacorporations that make software don't bother leaning on individuals when leaning on other corporations is more profitable (since with most software it's almost physically impossible to simultaneously use the software in any useful way and obey the license agreement)
If they might not be legally binding, see the note for reverse engineering -- I know I can't afford to get hit with a lawsuit, whether it has legal merit or not.
-> The example given above -- buying Word and a book -- is true even today, without the UCITA.
-> I don't think it's possible to return software even today. One of the points in the above article was that the terms of the license can be presented after the software was bought; this is already common practice. If you think this invalidates the license, see my note on shrink-wraps and lawsuits.
-> Computer companies already charge ridiculous amounts for support or don't even bother. Computer programs are already shipped with piles of bugs (Win9x anyone)
In sum, the UCITA is nothing other than a statement of existing laws and practices. That it sounds so terrible is more a reflection on the ethics and techniques of the proprietary software industry it covers than on the proposal itself.
Daniel
Just what I've always wanted! Transparent dialog boxes so I can clutter my screen up with windows in front of *and* behind what I'm working on! Great! Clearly a giant stride forwards in technology and interface design!
This does answer one question, though. When the G4 was released, I wondered: "Well, Apple has an incredibly powerful CPU, and they're working on an operating system that can actually use it (instead of blocking everything to poll the network card, for example). Now, it would be un-Apple to actually make this available to the user. Wonder how they'll burn all those extra cycles? Chrome, I bet." And I was right!
Daniel
Uh, TTL is essentially number of hops in v4, since it gets decremented once a second or whenever a hop occurs, whichever happens first..and hops are almost always less than a second long. Traceroute, in fact, depends on this behavior.
Daniel
what characteristics of full-color images makes them especially susceptible to wavelet compression, versus say, a text file or an executable binary? :)
I'd guess perhaps the fact that it's OK to perform lossy compression on an image, and that people see image compression as 'good' if most of the main image features are there (that is, good enough that a human observer won't immediately notice a difference). You wouldn't be too happy, I suspect, if you decompressed a text file and found that gzip had trimmed it down to something resembling Cliff Notes
Daniel
Given the success that projects like Linux, KDE and Gnome have shown using a completely opposite strategy, we have every reason to believe that such a model would work better.
Do you know, that's possibly the worst logical fallacy I've heard all week? Unless you think you've demonstrated something actually wrong with XFree's current model.
Daniel
I think it was a joke, Bruce :-)
Daniel
If moderation extended to articles I'd mark this one down Score -1: Flamebait. Not necessarily because it's inflammatory in and of itself (although the last comment was practically asking the soapboxers to come out of the woodwork), but because we've all seen this ground hashed over again, again, and again: "BSD license sucks! Disinfect the GPV! BSD==Proprietary! GPL==Commie Facists! BSD users are elitist jerks! Linux users are clueless idiots! BSD is k00l! Linux is k00l!" /. to try for a little more discretion in posting articles and to try to cut a little of the hype and bullbaiting. Not that the odds are in favor of this occuring..
I've browsed the first few comments and found that, unsurprisingly, they say nothing that hasn't already been repeated ad nauseum. I'd like to ask
Luck,
Daniel
Actually, you're wrong. It's paved with frozen door-to-door salesmen.
Daniel
(in case you were totally lost there, this is an obscure reference to the novel _Good Omens_. I'm not totally insane. Yet. Offtopic, maybe. But not insane. No. Not insane)
I'm not sure it will work in a large-scale project.
Well, much of Emacs is (as far as I know..) written in Lisp. Is that large-scale enough for you?
There's also Sawmill, which is a window-manager written mostly in Lisp, with C for the lowlevel routines.
Daniel
Uhh, OpenBSD didn't 'write' OpenSSH, they went back to the last version of SSH that had a free license and then backported all necessary security fixes. :)
Aside from that, you're right
Daniel
Indeed. That's a feature. :) :)
Fine. I've given up trying to argue with you about whether that's a good idea. What I'm saying is that the text of the license implies, to me, that the proprietary software company should not be allowed to do what you want to allow them to do, and I think you should try to find a better wording for that sentence
More specifically, I think that saying that you must not prevent others from "doing the same" implies that you must not prevent others from copying *the program*, and I think that *the program* refers to the program in all its forms -- that it, the program and any future versions of it.
What I'd suggest is saying something like:
"You may use, modify, and distribute this software as you please, with any restrictions that you like, so long as you do not attempt to prevent others from acquiring the program from another source and doing likewise" I understand that it's not quite as concise as your version, but it's much harder to misunderstand.
This is really drifting into the esoteric realm of semantics, though.
Daniel
Come now. You're smarter than that. Please explain to me how someone is going to sell this software now? :-)
The line you quoted was referring to the right to use the software; you claimed that the GNU license forbids you to use software in conjunction with proprietary libraries, which is false. Admittedly you can't redistribute the result if you've linked the code in, but this might be fine for some purposes. If you're really intent on it, I suspect you could distribute your modifications as patches.
Anyway, I'd like to kill this thread, as we're obviously all too stubborn to change positions. I suspect you're going to try to get the last word in, though
Luck,
Daniel
"do not prevent anyone from doing the same" is quite easily misinterpreted as "do not deny these rights to other people"
:)
That's not a misinterpretation. That's exactly what it means.
Excuse me? You just gone done telling me how happy you were that someone could take your code and relicense it as proprietary software. If you want things that way, that's fine, but the proprietary company is clearly preventing the users from doing what they did to that copy of the software. (yes, in theory the users could still get it from you, but I still maintain that the proprietary company violated your license as written -- and they could still get it even if that clause weren't there)
So I still think that the cause is superfluous and confusing -- if not, you should clarify what you mean a little.
I'm not going to argue about the GPL any more, it's clear that no-one's going to change his or her mind so we're just wasting breath, which is a fairly precious resource
Daniel
RedHat also sells support and various other merchandise, and manages to turn a profit. :)
Actually...they don't. Not that it bothers me, since I don't own any RHAT
Daniel