You can't really judge the responsiveness of Debian based on a sample of one... there's over a thousand people maintaining stuff in Debian. Sometimes people get a reply within half an hour, sometimes within half a decade.:)
I posted the story on DP, as an editor, but two other editors thought it was too controversial, so they put it back into the submissions queue until they rephrased it and put back on the front page.
I don't disagree with your idea that actually learning foreign languages has good uses, but you can't use "Serbo-Croat" here, because for the purposes of a translator like this, I'm fairly sure Serbian and Croatian are indeed different enough not to be lumped together.
If you write a phrase both in Croatian and in Serbian (with the latter using the Latin alphabet instead of Cyrillic) on a piece of paper, they might be very similar or in some cases even identical. But if you get two native speakers to pronounce these phrases, no matter how similar they are on paper, the machine will get two fairly different recordings to deal with.
Recently I started mirroring the GNU FTP site at http://ftp.linux.hr/pub/gnu/ . I submitted the site to the GNU project for inclusion on their list of mirrors, but they politely declined, because:
"Having `linux' in the name of GNU mirrors doesn't quite help us. We do not want to promote the common misunderstanding that Linux is an operating system."
I told them I couldn't be bothered to get another alias for the machine. I think I did my part already; they're free to choose if they consider the domain name more important than the mirror.
Seriously though, we are releasing woody which is twice as big considering the number of packages than potato. Yes, all previous Debian releases doubled the number of packages, but hey, we're up to eight thousand now, cut us some slack!
hamm was released on 1998-06-24, slink on 1999-03-09, potato on 2000-08-14, and woody will be released ~ 2002-05-01. Yeah, this sounds like it's going for the worse, but the new system (read: the "testing" distribution) would allow us to release woody+1 by the end of the year. This wouldn't be that bad, would it?:)
When packages install files as "conffiles" they tell the package management system they are special, configuration files. This enables the user to edit the files in question without worrying his changes will be clobbered with the next package upgrade.
Arguably those few hundred unmarked conffiles that have recently been filed as bugs are hardly noticeable, users surely would have complained had the packages overwritten their configuration settings. However, that's still no guarantee there aren't actually users that are getting hurt with these bugs.
Note also the bugs were filed with the "serious" severity, not "critical". These words have different meanings, see this page for an explanation.
Actually, that piece of woody web page is somewhat stale -- I've recently heard that boot-floppies 3.0.19 include a version which installs kernel 2.4. I'll go update the web page.
Btw never give two flowers to a girl from slavic culture.
You just made that up for the sake of this post, right? Because it sure isn't true for any Slavic girls I ever met, and I live in a predominantly Slavic community.
Then again, I could just be making this up. Maybe I'm a Martian, even. This is/. Think about what you are reading.:)
Upgrading to glibc 2.2 isn't really noticeable, for most people. As far as testing it is concerned, most developers run it, and numerous users all around the globe (and I do mean numerous).
AFAICT there aren't any major bug reports being filed because of glibc transition anymore, either, which is a good sign.
The above post says it's written by a Debian developer and is signed "Josip" -- this could only mean one person, joy at debian dot org. The person who wrote the above post is NOT Josip Rodin -- I am. This can be verified easily (unless this person also cracked my account or something).
The moral of this story -- take anonymous posts with a grain of salt. (or perhaps don't read them at all;)
(Thanks to robster for the link, I wouldn't have noticed this post otherwise.)
Oh, the maintainers of.rpms do their stuff. They just don't do it with the care.deb maintainers do. Does every RH.rpm have to abide to all the stuff like Debian Policy and Packaging Manual describe? Would they have releases twice a year if they did?
Of all the moments in history, your friend had to switch from Debian to Red Hat now that Red Hat made some of their biggest fsckups (RH7), and now that Debian made some of their biggest advances (2.2, plus `testing')? Honestly, I find that quite hard to believe.
Microsoft software hardly ever upgrades properly when the installation procedure is invoked manually. I fear the day `Windows update' becomes automatic... unless of course I get to work in some windoze tech support company. The consultants are going to make big money on fixing up all that crap.:>
You ought to actually _try_ current Debian before tossing off such snide remarks. The `stable' tree isn't wildly outdated, not at all.
I'm a developer, and although I'm quite capable of handling the breakages in unstable, I only upgraded a dozen packages over 2.2 on three of my machines, those that I use daily (the others still run pure stable). Additionally, there exists a new tree now, it's called `testing', that is considerably more stable than `unstable', and has more of the new, shiny stuff than `stable' does.
Feel free to relativize every difference between the packaging format. But I doubt you can do that with the endless hard work Debian maintainers invest in their packages.
FWIW. (I'd put a disclaimer here, being a maintainer of about forty.deb packages, but the above post didn't have one;)
Slashdot Mirror
The popularity-contest results have been used for ordering packages on CDs for years now. This was just a reminder.
Actually, that's the fragment of the thread from the (entirely offtopic) debian-testing mailing list. Here's the full thread on the debian-devel mailing list.
You can't really judge the responsiveness of Debian based on a sample of one... there's over a thousand people maintaining stuff in Debian. Sometimes people get a reply within half an hour, sometimes within half a decade. :)
I'm using the unstable distribution. You can get the newer package as well, please refer to the grub packages list for more information.
Version: 0.92+cvs20020923-1
I'm not sure what you are talking about there.
I posted the story on DP, as an editor, but two other editors thought it was too controversial, so they put it back into the submissions queue until they rephrased it and put back on the front page.
Move along people, nothing to see here...
I don't disagree with your idea that actually learning foreign languages has good uses, but you can't use "Serbo-Croat" here, because for the purposes of a translator like this, I'm fairly sure Serbian and Croatian are indeed different enough not to be lumped together.
If you write a phrase both in Croatian and in Serbian (with the latter using the Latin alphabet instead of Cyrillic) on a piece of paper, they might be very similar or in some cases even identical. But if you get two native speakers to pronounce these phrases, no matter how similar they are on paper, the machine will get two fairly different recordings to deal with.
TCP window size is variable.
I told them I couldn't be bothered to get another alias for the machine. I think I did my part already; they're free to choose if they consider the domain name more important than the mirror.
Weeding out all the crap from the Deskpros will likely take years... :/
Seriously though, we are releasing woody which is twice as big considering the number of packages than potato. Yes, all previous Debian releases doubled the number of packages, but hey, we're up to eight thousand now, cut us some slack!
hamm was released on 1998-06-24, slink on 1999-03-09, potato on 2000-08-14, and woody will be released ~ 2002-05-01. Yeah, this sounds like it's going for the worse, but the new system (read: the "testing" distribution) would allow us to release woody+1 by the end of the year. This wouldn't be that bad, would it? :)
Arguably those few hundred unmarked conffiles that have recently been filed as bugs are hardly noticeable, users surely would have complained had the packages overwritten their configuration settings. However, that's still no guarantee there aren't actually users that are getting hurt with these bugs.
Note also the bugs were filed with the "serious" severity, not "critical". These words have different meanings, see this page for an explanation.
Actually, that piece of woody web page is somewhat stale -- I've recently heard that boot-floppies 3.0.19 include a version which installs kernel 2.4. I'll go update the web page.
The site will soon be down if you continue posting it on Slashdot... :)
Read more about Serbo-Croatian.
I believe that's Matthias Ettrich.
You just made that up for the sake of this post, right? Because it sure isn't true for any Slavic girls I ever met, and I live in a predominantly Slavic community.
Then again, I could just be making this up. Maybe I'm a Martian, even. This is /. Think about what you are reading. :)
It's HTTP, not FTP.
See call for volunteers -- woody boot-floppies.
AFAICT there aren't any major bug reports being filed because of glibc transition anymore, either, which is a good sign.
The moral of this story -- take anonymous posts with a grain of salt. (or perhaps don't read them at all ;)
(Thanks to robster for the link, I wouldn't have noticed this post otherwise.)
Oh, don't worry, there's probably a .deb for that, too. ;)
Of all the moments in history, your friend had to switch from Debian to Red Hat now that Red Hat made some of their biggest fsckups (RH7), and now that Debian made some of their biggest advances (2.2, plus `testing')? Honestly, I find that quite hard to believe.
Microsoft software hardly ever upgrades properly when the installation procedure is invoked manually. I fear the day `Windows update' becomes automatic... unless of course I get to work in some windoze tech support company. The consultants are going to make big money on fixing up all that crap. :>
You ought to actually _try_ current Debian before tossing off such snide remarks. The `stable' tree isn't wildly outdated, not at all. I'm a developer, and although I'm quite capable of handling the breakages in unstable, I only upgraded a dozen packages over 2.2 on three of my machines, those that I use daily (the others still run pure stable). Additionally, there exists a new tree now, it's called `testing', that is considerably more stable than `unstable', and has more of the new, shiny stuff than `stable' does.
FWIW. (I'd put a disclaimer here, being a maintainer of about forty .deb packages, but the above post didn't have one ;)