..but I was wondering if you could clarify for me exactly what your status with Debian is now that you work for RH. Have you orphaned your packages, or are you still actively maintaining them? What's the state of gnome-apt? Last I checked it was (don't take this personally, please) pretty pathetic. Are you working on it or have you handed it off to someone else? In general -- what's the situation? Daniel
I think it's actually ironic that this is happening now. Previous versions of MacOS pretty well eliminated the advantages of SCSI by forcing the entire system to block on synchronous disk reads/mouse clicks/etc, and by not letting programs be immediately woken up when asynchronous I/O completed. I've always been annoyed to be sitting in front of a computer more powerful and expensive than anything I can imagine buying myself, and see the performance degradation brought on by the lack of a real way to handle multitasking. Even my computer felt quicker than all but the highest-end Macintoshes for interactive use (note: they still totally blew it away on numerical calculations:) ) So..now that Apple finally has a UNIX-based operating system which would really make their [superior] hardware shine, they're cutting back on the hardware? Their choice, I suppose.. (and yes, I read all the things saying that the SCSI is still available. How many of Apple's customers do you think even know that SCSI and IDE are 'things in their computer', let alone the differences between the two? No, I don't mean "does anyone here use Apple and know the difference", I mean "how much of Apple's target market knows the difference?") Daniel
Pardon me if I don't see how deceptive advertising, fraud and entrapment are rights. (Posing as offering different content, then forcing people to look at what *YOU* want them to look at? Even if these people were selling tofu it would be a problem!)
Everything still seems to stop on 8.6 when I so much as pull down a menu. They should have thrown everything out and started from scratch at least four or five years ago.
I've sworn not to touch a Macintosh for anything serious until OSX is released. Playing with cooperative-multitasking systems is not my idea of a good time.
Debian/PowerPC is considered to be stable as of February, 1998, and is currently being consolidated for release. More than 90% of the Debian packages are available, with the remaining packages being processed. Debian/PowerPC will be officially released with the next version of Debian (2.2; code-named potato).
Now -- it's possible that the first major PowerPC release will be finicky until they get all the bugs shaken out, but it looks like they're coming along pretty well. Unless you're working on the port and know something I don't. (I just hopped over to the page so I don't know what's going on on the lists)
Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer. A Lawyer Could Show Up And Say I'm A Blathering Idiot. Listen To The Lawyers.
As someone who said, "hey, that's clever!" upon first examining the GPL (in fact it was on a Windows program, I'd only read one other license more than a little, enough to convince me that basically anything you did after opening the shrinkwrap could be construed to violate it) I have to say that this is entirely false.
What the GPL states is that *if* you distribute the software, or any modifications thereof, you *must* transfer all rights which you received to the recipient. Period. No exceptions unless you are yourself the copyright holder. This confusion probably originates from the claim and counterclaim often heard when/. readers are embroiled in a Holy War: "The GPL forces you to make all your modifications public!!" "No it doesn't you [expletive deleted] dimwit, you can make unreleased modifications for *INTERNAL USE ONLY*!" Both of these claims are partially based in fact. The GPL **DOES REQUIRE** that all rights, including the right of free modification and redistribution, are transferred with the software. This has nothing to do with internal or external distribution. I quote: 4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under the License... However, the second claim also contains a grain of truth! While the GPL does require a complete transferrence of rights, it *DOES NOT* require you to transfer those rights to the world at large. Of course, distribution is difficult (to say the least) to control once it's gone beyond, say, a small development team under contract to you -- but technically, if I give Joe the software, Mary does not have the right to use it until either Joe or I give it to her. Most GPLed programs are provided for anyone to download, so this doesn't come into play much. But unless I have entirely misread the license, this is how things -- technically -- work. Unless the legal system is more intelligent than I thought, and can deduce that placing something under the GPL probably means that finding a CD lying by the side of the road is a perfectly valid way to get a hold of it.:-) [ note: I'm over my head. But wouldn't I technically be violating the copyright of commercial software if I stumbled on a CD like that?) Anyway -- this is all irrelevant since this is clearly not internal distribution. And even if it is, it's clearly a dumb thing to do from the point of view of playing nice; in fact, Corel *taken as a whole* is probably not this dumb. See technocrat.net for a furious posting from an insider about how this decision was (or wasn't) made.
That's somewhat scary. I grew up next to the main campus, and I'm glad now that I didn't go to school there:-/ (on the other hand, we'll see whether the students can remain sober for long enough to notice the change, especially given that the football season is starting right about now..)
How helpful is it to cache on random machines? I thought that the big benefit of caching was that you didn't have to retrieve it over the network -- or is disk speed usually the limiting factor?
Ok, let's assume for the sake of argument that *BSD kernels really are somewhat superior to the Linux kernel for high-end network programs. Why should I bother replacing Linux? Here are the reasons usually given.. -> BSD is more secure. How secure is secure enough, and how much of this has to do with BSD? The kernel itself is (AFAIK) almost meaningless in this equation in the case of my computer, on which I'm pretty much the only account-holder. All potential vulnerabilities (barring nasty remote-crash surprises, in which case I'll patch against them anyway) will be in userland programs. Everything I have listening on any port is--surprise, surprise--also available for BSD: Apache, Exim, and ssh. -> BSD is more robust. Again, *assuming* that this is true, Linux is plenty robust for me. It *does not crash*. Period. Next... -> BSD has this nifty 'ports' thing... apt-get install. apt-get source. -> Linux people aren't True God-Designated Computer Gurus! And there was much rejoicing... -> BSD's not GNU! The vitriol I've seen from just about every BSD user whenever GNU is mentioned is amazing. It in itself is enough to convince me that I'd rather avoid BSD. Unfortunately, this and the next objection seem to be the primary arguments of most "switch to BSD people". -> Linux Sucks! No comment.
Listen: Linux and BSD are, for all intents and purposes, identical systems in userland (except that Linux distros usually build on the more featureful GNU libraries and utilities). Anything I can do on Linux I can also do on BSD. I don't serve massive volumes of Web pages or high-traffic mailing lists. Even if I did, I doubt BSD would be that helpful, but as it is I don't need it at all. Let me rephrase that: I have a UNIX system that works perfectly. Why should I switch to another kernel just because some guy was frightened by Richard Stallman as a young child or something? Do what you like, I don't care as long as it looks like Unix:) But if I want to play with other kernels I'll take the Hurd, thank you. Daniel
Obviously Debian cannot ship GPG as part of the base system or even on CDs. But would it be legal for the initial selection list in dselect to include gpg? I don't think gpg should be upgraded to priority Standard, but perhaps it could be included in the Mail metapackage; would this count as an encryption "hook"? There was a proposal recently to allow packages to declare which metapackage(s) they belong to; would this be a generic enough "hook" mechanism that gpg could be included in it?
Unfortunately I already got rid of my 3com card for an older, technically slower one which happens to transmit at about 50-100 times the rate I previously got using the Linux drivers. (don't ask)
Is it just me, or does this translation remind anyone else of the famous "Gefingerpoken" paper?
Dieses Mark ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben! Ist easy ausragen den Users, lacheln den Publik, und mailbomben mit schmutzig-Worden. Ist nicht fuer gekaufen von den Dumbkopfen! Die rubbernecken sichtseern keepen das cotten-pickenen lawyers weg muss; relaxen und den Marketvergrossung watchen.
Well, there's nothing really in the Debian menu system that makes it distribution-specific. At least not that I know. Certainly not conceptually, and any oversights could be corrected pretty quickly. I just don't think anyone else has bothered to use it. That said, if you want something more flexible, I was involved in a discussion once upon a time called "My Little Wish List for Gnome," which ended up proposing a system very much like Debian's but even better. Admittedly, it was in the context of discussing Gnome menus, but there's no reason we couldn't subsume it into a generic window-manager menu specification language. If I were likely to have time at any point in the near future I might even implement it..
I'm glad to see you volunteering to set up a new packaging format and standard Way Of Doing Things, and then convince everyone that your way is patently better than theirs. Call me back in a few dozen years when you've convinced them:P
Most differences between distributions are really quite minor from a developer's point of view. Saying that you need 10 different versions is..um..stretching the point. A lot. You probably have more code in your program now to support multiple OSes (even multiple Unicies) than you need to support all 4 auto-menu-generators that I know of, unless the program is totally trivial. Distributions differ in the system infrastructure they use: how packages are installed, how documentation is (or isn't) registered, how init scripts are handled, etc. If you really can't be bothered to change a few lines of code you should get in touch with someone affiliated with the distribution. Debian developers, at any rate, are quite happy to get your software nicely packaged (the trick is to make them stop!) and I have no reason to believe that other distributions are different.
Actually, Windows has a 'hosts' file. C:\WINDOWS\hosts. At least I think it does. If it doesn't I'm kind of concerned about how the Windows machine I was gatewaying for this summer was finding my hostname..gremlins perhaps..:-)
And RedHat has something similar. If you can't bother to make your package follow the distribution's policy you're going to have a package that looks poorly put together. WM-specific menu hacks are **EVIL**. See update-menus(1).
Remember LinuxPPC? They gave out the root password and no-one could break in. If nothing is listening on any port it doesn't matter what root's password is. (even exim and so on can do this..deny connections to the SMTP port from anything but localhost. ipchains is your friend) Of course, what happens what the user types 'rm -rf/' is another story, but we're assuming that people who can't understand the concept of root won't be mucking around in a shell..:-P Daniel
AFAIK this is not that much of a problem (except that it sucks for the individuals who are subjected to premature aging) as long as offspring are possible. The telomeres will be regenerated in the stem cells.
That said, having these critters reproduce seems fairly pointless -- the limited gene pool means that you won't really bring back a species, just have a few cute examples of what the world used to be like.
Slashdot Mirror
By selling cheap hardware of course! :P
Daniel
..but I was wondering if you could clarify for me exactly what your status with Debian is now that you work for RH. Have you orphaned your packages, or are you still actively maintaining them? What's the state of gnome-apt? Last I checked it was (don't take this personally, please) pretty pathetic. Are you working on it or have you handed it off to someone else?
In general -- what's the situation?
Daniel
I think it's actually ironic that this is happening now. Previous versions of MacOS pretty well eliminated the advantages of SCSI by forcing the entire system to block on synchronous disk reads/mouse clicks/etc, and by not letting programs be immediately woken up when asynchronous I/O completed. I've always been annoyed to be sitting in front of a computer more powerful and expensive than anything I can imagine buying myself, and see the performance degradation brought on by the lack of a real way to handle multitasking. Even my computer felt quicker than all but the highest-end Macintoshes for interactive use (note: they still totally blew it away on numerical calculations :) )
So..now that Apple finally has a UNIX-based operating system which would really make their [superior] hardware shine, they're cutting back on the hardware? Their choice, I suppose..
(and yes, I read all the things saying that the SCSI is still available. How many of Apple's customers do you think even know that SCSI and IDE are 'things in their computer', let alone the differences between the two? No, I don't mean "does anyone here use Apple and know the difference", I mean "how much of Apple's target market knows the difference?")
Daniel
Pardon me if I don't see how deceptive advertising, fraud and entrapment are rights. (Posing as offering different content, then forcing people to look at what *YOU* want them to look at? Even if these people were selling tofu it would be a problem!)
Daniel
Everything still seems to stop on 8.6 when I so much as pull down a menu. They should have thrown everything out and started from scratch at least four or five years ago.
I've sworn not to touch a Macintosh for anything serious until OSX is released. Playing with cooperative-multitasking systems is not my idea of a good time.
Daniel
This is what I thought, too, but from Debian's PowerPC port page:
Status
Debian/PowerPC is considered to be stable as of February, 1998, and is currently being consolidated for release. More than
90% of the Debian packages are available, with the remaining packages being processed. Debian/PowerPC will be officially
released with the next version of Debian (2.2; code-named potato).
Now -- it's possible that the first major PowerPC release will be finicky until they get all the bugs shaken out, but it looks like they're coming along pretty well. Unless you're working on the port and know something I don't. (I just hopped over to the page so I don't know what's going on on the lists)
Daniel
As someone who said, "hey, that's clever!" upon first examining the GPL (in fact it was on a Windows program, I'd only read one other license more than a little, enough to convince me that basically anything you did after opening the shrinkwrap could be construed to violate it) I have to say that this is entirely false.
/. readers are embroiled in a Holy War: "The GPL forces you to make all your modifications public!!" "No it doesn't you [expletive deleted] dimwit, you can make unreleased modifications for *INTERNAL USE ONLY*!" Both of these claims are partially based in fact. The GPL **DOES REQUIRE** that all rights, including the right of free modification and redistribution, are transferred with the software. This has nothing to do with internal or external distribution. I quote: :-) [ note: I'm over my head. But wouldn't I technically be violating the copyright of commercial software if I stumbled on a CD like that?)
What the GPL states is that *if* you distribute the software, or any modifications thereof, you *must* transfer all rights which you received to the recipient. Period. No exceptions unless you are yourself the copyright holder.
This confusion probably originates from the claim and counterclaim often heard when
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under the License...
However, the second claim also contains a grain of truth! While the GPL does require a complete transferrence of rights, it *DOES NOT* require you to transfer those rights to the world at large. Of course, distribution is difficult (to say the least) to control once it's gone beyond, say, a small development team under contract to you -- but technically, if I give Joe the software, Mary does not have the right to use it until either Joe or I give it to her. Most GPLed programs are provided for anyone to download, so this doesn't come into play much. But unless I have entirely misread the license, this is how things -- technically -- work. Unless the legal system is more intelligent than I thought, and can deduce that placing something under the GPL probably means that finding a CD lying by the side of the road is a perfectly valid way to get a hold of it.
Anyway -- this is all irrelevant since this is clearly not internal distribution. And even if it is, it's clearly a dumb thing to do from the point of view of playing nice; in fact, Corel *taken as a whole* is probably not this dumb. See technocrat.net for a furious posting from an insider about how this decision was (or wasn't) made.
Daniel
That's somewhat scary. I grew up next to the main campus, and I'm glad now that I didn't go to school there :-/
(on the other hand, we'll see whether the students can remain sober for long enough to notice the change, especially given that the football season is starting right about now..)
Daniel
Ours (Brown U) already has a rack of a couple of the common commercial distros (no Debian unfortunately) and a whole shelf of UNIX books.
Daniel
How helpful is it to cache on random machines? I thought that the big benefit of caching was that you didn't have to retrieve it over the network -- or is disk speed usually the limiting factor?
Daniel
I should have said 'just about every BSD user I've discussed the topic with'. In my head the qualification was implied but I forgot to type it :-P
Daniel
You've posted only 3 comments on /., and all 3 are either trolls or flamebait. Such dedication is impressive.
Daniel
Ok, let's assume for the sake of argument that *BSD kernels really are somewhat superior to the Linux kernel for high-end network programs. Why should I bother replacing Linux? Here are the reasons usually given..
:) But if I want to play with other kernels I'll take the Hurd, thank you.
-> BSD is more secure.
How secure is secure enough, and how much of this has to do with BSD? The kernel itself is (AFAIK) almost meaningless in this equation in the case of my computer, on which I'm pretty much the only account-holder. All potential vulnerabilities (barring nasty remote-crash surprises, in which case I'll patch against them anyway) will be in userland programs. Everything I have listening on any port is--surprise, surprise--also available for BSD: Apache, Exim, and ssh.
-> BSD is more robust.
Again, *assuming* that this is true, Linux is plenty robust for me. It *does not crash*. Period. Next...
-> BSD has this nifty 'ports' thing...
apt-get install. apt-get source.
-> Linux people aren't True God-Designated Computer Gurus!
And there was much rejoicing...
-> BSD's not GNU!
The vitriol I've seen from just about every BSD user whenever GNU is mentioned is amazing. It in itself is enough to convince me that I'd rather avoid BSD. Unfortunately, this and the next objection seem to be the primary arguments of most "switch to BSD people".
-> Linux Sucks!
No comment.
Listen: Linux and BSD are, for all intents and purposes, identical systems in userland (except that Linux distros usually build on the more featureful GNU libraries and utilities). Anything I can do on Linux I can also do on BSD. I don't serve massive volumes of Web pages or high-traffic mailing lists. Even if I did, I doubt BSD would be that helpful, but as it is I don't need it at all. Let me rephrase that: I have a UNIX system that works perfectly. Why should I switch to another kernel just because some guy was frightened by Richard Stallman as a young child or something?
Do what you like, I don't care as long as it looks like Unix
Daniel
Um, is this a satire piece? I really hope so..
Daniel
Obviously Debian cannot ship GPG as part of the base system or even on CDs. But would it be legal for the initial selection list in dselect to include gpg? I don't think gpg should be upgraded to priority Standard, but perhaps it could be included in the Mail metapackage; would this count as an encryption "hook"? There was a proposal recently to allow packages to declare which metapackage(s) they belong to; would this be a generic enough "hook" mechanism that gpg could be included in it?
Daniel
Unfortunately I already got rid of my 3com card for an older, technically slower one which happens to transmit at about 50-100 times the rate I previously got using the Linux drivers. (don't ask)
Oh well.
Daniel
Is it just me, or does this translation remind anyone else of the famous "Gefingerpoken" paper?
Dieses Mark ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben! Ist easy ausragen den Users, lacheln den Publik, und mailbomben mit schmutzig-Worden. Ist nicht fuer gekaufen von den Dumbkopfen! Die rubbernecken sichtseern keepen das cotten-pickenen lawyers weg muss; relaxen und den Marketvergrossung watchen.
Daniel
I think he was thinking of "glockenspiel". Dunno what he has against them. Maybe he's heard the Monty Python sketch "Bells" a few too many times? :-)
Daniel
Gnome 1.0.50 ... 55% complete ... target date: September 15, 1999
:-)
Ouch! Either you folks moved up the release date, you're about to push it back, or you're bugfixing gods..
Daniel
Well, there's nothing really in the Debian menu system that makes it distribution-specific. At least not that I know. Certainly not conceptually, and any oversights could be corrected pretty quickly. I just don't think anyone else has bothered to use it.
That said, if you want something more flexible, I was involved in a discussion once upon a time called "My Little Wish List for Gnome," which ended up proposing a system very much like Debian's but even better. Admittedly, it was in the context of discussing Gnome menus, but there's no reason we couldn't subsume it into a generic window-manager menu specification language. If I were likely to have time at any point in the near future I might even implement it..
Daniel
I'm glad to see you volunteering to set up a new packaging format and standard Way Of Doing Things, and then convince everyone that your way is patently better than theirs. :P
Call me back in a few dozen years when you've convinced them
Most differences between distributions are really quite minor from a developer's point of view. Saying that you need 10 different versions is..um..stretching the point. A lot. You probably have more code in your program now to support multiple OSes (even multiple Unicies) than you need to support all 4 auto-menu-generators that I know of, unless the program is totally trivial.
Distributions differ in the system infrastructure they use: how packages are installed, how documentation is (or isn't) registered, how init scripts are handled, etc. If you really can't be bothered to change a few lines of code you should get in touch with someone affiliated with the distribution. Debian developers, at any rate, are quite happy to get your software nicely packaged (the trick is to make them stop!) and I have no reason to believe that other distributions are different.
Daniel
Actually, Windows has a 'hosts' file. C:\WINDOWS\hosts. At least I think it does. If it doesn't I'm kind of concerned about how the Windows machine I was gatewaying for this summer was finding my hostname..gremlins perhaps.. :-)
Daniel
?package(gnome-control-center):needs=X11 sections=Apps/System\
title="Mouse Properties" command="/usr/bin/mouse-properties"
And RedHat has something similar. If you can't bother to make your package follow the distribution's policy you're going to have a package that looks poorly put together. WM-specific menu hacks are **EVIL**. See update-menus(1).
Daniel
Remember LinuxPPC? They gave out the root password and no-one could break in. If nothing is listening on any port it doesn't matter what root's password is. (even exim and so on can do this..deny connections to the SMTP port from anything but localhost. ipchains is your friend) /' is another story, but we're assuming that people who can't understand the concept of root won't be mucking around in a shell.. :-P
Of course, what happens what the user types 'rm -rf
Daniel
AFAIK this is not that much of a problem (except that it sucks for the individuals who are subjected to premature aging) as long as offspring are possible. The telomeres will be regenerated in the stem cells.
That said, having these critters reproduce seems fairly pointless -- the limited gene pool means that you won't really bring back a species, just have a few cute examples of what the world used to be like.
Daniel