If we didn't have government intervention in the form of unemployment compensation, then we wouldn't have this issue. Instead we'd have lower taxes, more money to spend on other government service, or less deficit (moving money from treasury bills to other invesments like stocks or corporate bonds, which create jobs). People could use the resulting extra money to save for the possibility of losing their jobs.
Byblos.
Ancient city, E Mediterranean coast. Located north of modern Beirut, it was occupied at least by the Neolithic period; extensive settlement developed during the 4th millennium BC. As the chief harbor for the export of cedar to Egypt, it was a great trading center. Papyrus received its early Greek name, byblos, from its export to the Aegean through Byblos; Bible means essentially "the (papyrus) book." Byblos has yielded almost all the known early Phoenician inscriptions, most from the 10th cent. BC. By that time Tyre had become predominant in Phoenicia, and Byblos, though it flourished into Roman times, never recovered its former supremacy.
Etymology: Middle English papir, from Middle French papier, from Latin papyrus papyrus, paper, from Greek papyros papyrus
Date: 14th century
Re:Doubling every 42 days? I doubt it.
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
I realize it's anecdotal evidence, so it is not absolute proof of anything, but it does illustrate why the article's claim that spam has been doubling every 42 days, which would mean an increase of more than 128X in the past ten months, should not be taken seriously without some statistical evidence.
Even if your spam has more than doubled in the past ten months, you would need to argue that the number of internet email addresses has increased by a factor of large enough to work out to an increase of 128X of total spam. For example, if you spam has gone up by a factor of exactly 2, you would need argue that the number of internet addresses has increased by 64X in the past ten months. If you can't honestly do that, then you haven't even shown any anecodotal evidence to support the article's claim.
Re:Doubling every 42 days? I doubt it.
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
OK, I was a little unclear. The number of users doesn't have to increase by that much, the number of mail addresses has to increase. Considering the number of people that get second and third addresses as "spam traps," this seems entirely plausible to me.
People have been setting up second and third email addresses in large numbers for years. If you are claiming that the number of email addresses has increased by more than 8X in the past ten months, then I think that claim seems sufficiently implausible that the burden of proof should be on you to provide some statistical evidence to back up that claim.
Re:Doubling every 42 days? I doubt it.
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
Suppose that the number of internet users
(or even internet mail boxes)
doubled in the last ten months, an estimate
which I think is
probably pretty high given business conditions
during that period. I received a lot more than
two spams per day ten months ago.
I received a lot more than four or eight spams per day ten months ago, if you want to be really ridiculous and argue that the number of users has quadrupled or octupled in the last ten months.
Doubling every 42 days? I doubt it.
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
In the past few weeks, I've received an
average of 117 messages per day, just under
2**7. 42 days x 7 = 294 days, just under ten
months. Ten months ago, I was receiving
a lot more than 1 spam per day. This count
does not include messages blocked by my mailer
because the sender's domain does not match
and so on. However, my spam blocking arrangements
have not changed during this period. So, at
least the spam that I see has not been doubling every 42 days.
[I've edited the HTML tags slightly to accomodate slashdot filters. Otherwise, this is Bruce's article unmodified.--Adam]
You may re-publish this message or excerpts of it.
FALSE OPEN SOURCE REPRESENTATIVE CALLS FOR EUROPEAN
SOFTWARE PATENTS
A false or misled "open source representative" has signed
an industry resolution calling for
the EU to allow software patenting, which has been sent to members
of the European Parliament. Copies of the resolution are
here and
here .
The European Legal Affairs Committee holds a plenary vote on
software patenting this Wednesday, and may have been influenced by
the false representation.
Graham Taylor is director of Open Forum Europe, an
organization that is purported to work for broader acceptance of Open
Source. Taylor has appeared at various trade shows in Europe, saying
reasoanble things about Open Source, for the past year.
Open Forum Europe is a
division of IT Forum Foundation and InterForum. InterForum's
membership includes a number of large companies that have a vested
interest in the promotion of software patenting in Europe.
Mr. Taylor's sponsor organization is well
connected with the EU government.
I would encourage Mr. Taylor to evangelize Open Source
software, something he's done successfully for a while.
However, he does not have the credentials to represent the
Linux, Open Source and Free Software developer communities,
especially when he contradicts our extremely strong opposition to
software patenting.
While Mr. Taylor has been visible as a public
speaker, it does not appear that he has any engagement with Open
Source projects and developers, or that he brought this matter up
with representative organizations such as the
Free Software Foundation,
the Open Source Initiative,
and
Software in the Public Interest.
No legitimate Open Source representative would
think of taking this sort of position with government without
first holding a public consultation with the developer community.
Software patents could be fatal for Open Source software in the U.S.
and Europe.
Since we do not
collect royalties from the distribution of our own software, we have no
funds to pay royalties to patent holders.
Rather than sue us to collect money, expect patent holders to sue Open Source
developers to restrain them from distributing their software or carrying
out further development. Companies that produce proprietary software
would bring that sort of suit to kill us off as a competitor.
While we can sometimes work around a patented algorithm that we know
about, the Open Source developer is not able to defend himself from patent
infringement claims, even invalid ones. In the U.S., the cost of a patent
infringement defense often exceeds US$500,000. The Open Source
developer, an individual working on his own time, won't have the
funds to defend himself.
He will be compelled to settle with his
accuser, regardless of the merits of the case, in order to preserve
what assets the plaintiff deigns to leave him. The copyrights of his own
software won't be among those assets.
We are especially threatened by royalty-bearing software patents
that are embedded in industry standards. In many cases, it is
impossible to achieve compliance with a standard without infringing
upon the patented algorithms that are specified by that standard.
Standard compliance is critical for interoperability, and thus software
patents in standards can make an un-communicating island of a Linux
system. For example, the IEEE 1488 FireWire standard is encumbered by
patents that apply to the software interfacing to it, and a patent
r
[...] I can't recall any software he's written other than GNU Emacs.
I believe that Richard Stallman
wrote
most of the original GNU C compiler, although it was derived
partly from a
portable optimizer
from a 1978 Univeristy of Arizona research project.
"Free market" is not a boolean value. The market
is less free due to the Digital Millentium Copyright Act. As a result of the Lexmark DMCA decision, the suppliers of toner and inkjet cartridges can be limited to the few companies that make printers and those that they authorize (presumably for fees that eliminate much of the economic advantage for consumers).
Basically, companies that can manufacture ink jet cartridges (relatively small products) but cannot manufacture their own printers can be locked out of the market, eliminating consumers' ability to choose to buy from these smaller companies.
Thank you for your informative post. I just want to pick one nit about silent versus quiet. I think the relevant definition of silent
from webster.com is their second definition:
2 : free from sound or noise : STILL
I think you meant to say that IBM drives can be made to run quietly rather than silently, unless the amount of noise
that they make is truely zero (which generally is true when the drive is spun down or turned off, but I don't think that is what you were referring to).
As I try to do with most bad news in the
yro.slashdot.org, I try to learn a little more
about the specific people or person who seems
to be chiseling at our freedom. This
time, I came across an
interesting link about
the connection between Judge Richard Stearns
(who ruled in this case) and former president
Bill Clinton.
I don't buy the CIA connection theory, nor would I necessarily consider it to be a bad thing if it were true. It's just the connection with former president Bill Clinton that I find helpful in looking into
who Judge Richard Stearns is.
I wish this announcement were not an April
Fools joke. Fellowship of the Ring was cut
much better than The Two Towers. I think that
the cartoonish special effects to represent the
Ents was probably also the result of a too
tight schedule. I think that with a little
more time, the Ents probably would have been
redone, and a more careful viewing of the movie
would probably have resulted in removal or replacement of some of the credibility-destroying scenes, like when Legolas became a skateboarder in the middle of the battle for Helms Deep. I also think the comic relief by Gimli should and would have been toned down a bit.
There was nothing that I can recall in the original theatrical release of the Fellowship of the Ring that made me cringe (some of the material that in the Extended Release did, but that largely shows what a good job of editting was done in the Fellowship of Ring theatrical release). In comparison, there were several places in The Two Towers that made me cringe.
If this material is ever constructed, I wonder if
it would allow for much more powerful but smaller telescopes.
I believe that some negative refractive index lens had been made that worked for microwaves. I wonder if that would allow for much higher resolution microwave astronomy.
I'd like to have a PDA that simultaneously
has Linux, wireless and a camera, so that I could
use it to transmit pictures, and perhaps try to
make it into a video phone, or, perhaps someday,
an encrypted video phone (and perhaps a remote desktop or remote TV, although I don't need a camera on the PDA for those applications).
I have a Toshiba e740, which has built-in 802.11b wireless and CF and SDIO slots, but I haven't seen Linux
for it and I haven't yet found the time to look into trying to port ARM Linux on it seriously, although I did see a posting to the effect that porting to the e740 is expected to be difficult to impossible because it is much less documented than the iPAQ.
So now I wonder if I should get the Zaurus. It has Linux with drivers for the Prism-based 802.11b wireless CF cards such as one from Socket (I believe all of the 802.11b cards on the market are prism based, but I'm not sure). However, that would mean using an SDIO camera, and I don't know of one with published specifications (for example, there is one from Veo, but Veo does not document the protocols used to talk to their Observer camera, which I made the mistake of buying).
If anyone cares to respond to this query, I would appreciate separate indications of whether a device has well documented hardware without need to sign a nondisclosure agreement and whether a device has a driver. If I would have to use a binary-only driver (which I regard as probably illegal anyhow), I would be tied running one particular kernel, and would therefore rather not buy it at all. On the other hand, with documented hardware, I could conceivably write a driver.
What I'd really like to know is why not
use
3gio / PCI Express, the upcoming
variable-width PCI bus that can shrink to
a 250 million byte per second point-to-point "one lane" configuraturation that sounds like it could replace USB, firewire, ethernet, serial ATA and serial SCSI. The drive would be
"directly" on the PCI bus. I would think that
this approach would involve the least amount
of silicon on a computer that already had PCI Express.
n.b.: Putting the controller logic back
in the drive unit harkens back to the original
In Drive Electronics approach.
Any State Party to the Treaty may give notice of its withdrawal from the Treaty one year after its entry into force by written notification
to the Depositary Governments. Such withdrawal shall take effect one year from the date of receipt of this notification.
So, how do you get replacement cat kidneys? Do you wait until a suitable donor dies of natural causes, or do you just
butcher the first one that will work?
I don't know how it is currently done, but I believe that a typical animal shelter (not a "no kill" shelter) kills many cats a day. If a shelter were going to kill a donor cat at a given
time regardless of whether that cat was going to be an organ donor, then I don't think it would be crueler for them to instead do the donor surgery that the cat does not wake up from.
Both of my cats have ID chips, so I don't think an animal shelter would kill them as long as my phone still works, but, I think that if I found out that some pet of mine had been killed in a shelter due to a faulty ID chip or whatever, it would, if anything, console me a bit know that a kidney had been used to save another pet, provided that I was convinced that the demand for the kidney had not accelerated the time to kill my pet.
I saw a television documentary a while ago where they showed plants that had leaves that were dying that looked a bit "burned" and explained that it was due to ozone from Los Angeles. Sorry, I don't remember any more details about the television program.
I realize that sometime documentaries get their facts wrong. Perhaps the problem was really being caused by something else. I don't know.
You haven't shown any benefit to the different names for commands and options used in Aegis in the cases where those differences are unnecessary (see BitKeeper as an example of using compatible names and options when possible).
You also seem to be very confused about the issue of an "uber-cvs" (which you seem to be confusing with file-based revision systems like SCCS and RCS--the "uber-cvs" part is not currently distributed separately from the rest of Aegis). I realize that Aegis does contain an "uber-cvs", to use your term. My point is that that functionality would have broader applicability as a separate software package.
Since you say "So you obviously didn't RTFM" and then completely ignore my point about all of the additional commands in the HOWTO, I don't think that you're reading my responses carefully enough so that it would be the a good prioritization of anyone's time for me to respond to you further. You may have the last word now if you like.
The aegis program itself is not to "ameliorate the complexity" of
other programs, it is the workhorse that implements the process and is the only executable the
vast majority of users will end up running. The other ae* programs are for ancillary functions
like generating reports, distributing change sets, command completion, etc. They need only be
learned as needed, or by an administrator, in much the same way that not every developer who
uses CVS has to learn the branching mechanisms.
I have to admit, I was looking at the many commands in the howto and didn't notice that
very few of them are in/usr/bin (where did they go?). Even so, aediff, aepatch, aeimport, and aecomp look rather fundamental. The "common commands" section of the howto lists 11 new commands, for example. I think it's fair to say that given that that the "aegis" program and the howto define two different command syntaxes for the same thing, somebody else must also have felt that there was something wrong with at least one of these syntaxes (both of which share the disadvantage of not being compatible with some other program like rcs or sccs in cases where that is possible).
It is irrelevant that you consider Aegis to be "a huge step forward from
underlying, raw source-code management commands, and it is for far more important reasons than command-line syntax", because all I am saying
is that making these commands incomptable in cases where the incompatability is unnecessary is an unnecessary disadvantage.
(If we're going to point out parts of the argument that are being ignored, though, I didn't see
anything explaining why you think Aegis isn't separable from the underlying source-code
management after I pointed out that it can be configured to use any package.:-)
What you call "underlying source-code management"
is not what I was referring to. I said, "I'd like a cvs variant (incompatible if need be) that would suport atomic operations, symlinks, inode
information, renaming files, and maybe some distributed development features." aegis apparently has a layer for representing these types of transactions (that operates on top of an
existing file-based revision control system such as sccs or rcs). That layer is what I think should be separate, as I think it has much
broader applicability.
it has been pretty quiet lately on the aegis mailing list, I dont recall seeing your name there. There
are other people that could have helped you if you asked.
I don't recall saying that I had found a case of Aegis not running as intended. I said I do not believe it would be a net savings of my time to adopt software that is intended to run that way (with logic bombs, unnecessary new syntax that is not a substantial improvement, etc.).
Maybe you should have payed more attention to the manual than to dissecting the source.
I don't know what you mean by this.
I read much, but not all, of the documnetation in aegis/lib/en. Perhaps your meaning would be clearer if you could quote a passage of the documentation that solves, to my satisfaction, one of the problems that I referred to.
I view the fact that Peter Miller chose not to just pass-through the (often clunky)
underlying syntax of the source-code management commands to be a great strength of Aegis, not a
weakness.
I never said that Aegis should "just pass-through" commands. If Aegis were to use, say, rcs-compatible commands where possible, I would still want it to use those commands even if it were using SCCS underneath (like BitKeeper).
I also said "[I] would also consider incompatible command names and options to be worthwhile if the new syntax were a enough of a user interface improvement, but that doesn't seem to be the case here." Aegis installs 17 new programs (at least they begin with "ae") plus an "aegis" program that is designed to implement yet another command syntax in an attempt to ameliorate the complexity of the ae* programs.
Perhaps you feel that the argument syntax of these 17 new programs is a great improvement over cvs (but readers may notice that you don't explain why), in which case I'll leave it to interested readers to check out some of the aegis manual pages and form their own conclusions.
For me, I probably would be willing to climb the Aegis learning curve if the logic bomb issue were resolved, but I mention the unnecessary command line incompatability issue because other people may find this information useful when surveying source code control systems.
There is no need to perform the entire Linux kernel build as root - only the final install requires
root privilege.
Users should be able to make that decision themselves.
(It's also worth noting that, aegis, as shipped, also refused to run from my personal account because my user-id belong to group 0, "system".)
Imagine if other development tool authors also inserted logic bombs to enforce their varying
and probably conflicting
system administration philosophies. I repeat:
Whether Peter Miller's favorite policies are optimal is not the issue to me. For me, an important aspect
of free software is that the owner of a computer is given maximum control. If the group maintaining a
piece of software is basically trying to wrest that control from the computer owner, then my distrust of
that group is enough so that the amount of work I would have to do in studying every line of their code
and undoing their logic bombs is exceeds the productivity benefits that I would expect from using the
software.
Slashdot Mirror
I said elimiante unemployment insurance, not eliminate welfare. People who were down to that level would still qualify for welfare.
If we didn't have government intervention in the form of unemployment compensation, then we wouldn't have this issue. Instead we'd have lower taxes, more money to spend on other government service, or less deficit (moving money from treasury bills to other invesments like stocks or corporate bonds, which create jobs). People could use the resulting extra money to save for the possibility of losing their jobs.
Paper also comes from papyrus:
Even if your spam has more than doubled in the past ten months, you would need to argue that the number of internet email addresses has increased by a factor of large enough to work out to an increase of 128X of total spam. For example, if you spam has gone up by a factor of exactly 2, you would need argue that the number of internet addresses has increased by 64X in the past ten months. If you can't honestly do that, then you haven't even shown any anecodotal evidence to support the article's claim.
People have been setting up second and third email addresses in large numbers for years. If you are claiming that the number of email addresses has increased by more than 8X in the past ten months, then I think that claim seems sufficiently implausible that the burden of proof should be on you to provide some statistical evidence to back up that claim.
I received a lot more than four or eight spams per day ten months ago, if you want to be really ridiculous and argue that the number of users has quadrupled or octupled in the last ten months.
In the past few weeks, I've received an average of 117 messages per day, just under 2**7. 42 days x 7 = 294 days, just under ten months. Ten months ago, I was receiving a lot more than 1 spam per day. This count does not include messages blocked by my mailer because the sender's domain does not match and so on. However, my spam blocking arrangements have not changed during this period. So, at least the spam that I see has not been doubling every 42 days.
You may re-publish this message or excerpts of it.
FALSE OPEN SOURCE REPRESENTATIVE CALLS FOR EUROPEAN SOFTWARE PATENTS
A false or misled "open source representative" has signed an industry resolution calling for the EU to allow software patenting, which has been sent to members of the European Parliament. Copies of the resolution are here and here . The European Legal Affairs Committee holds a plenary vote on software patenting this Wednesday, and may have been influenced by the false representation.
Graham Taylor is director of Open Forum Europe, an organization that is purported to work for broader acceptance of Open Source. Taylor has appeared at various trade shows in Europe, saying reasoanble things about Open Source, for the past year. Open Forum Europe is a division of IT Forum Foundation and InterForum. InterForum's membership includes a number of large companies that have a vested interest in the promotion of software patenting in Europe. Mr. Taylor's sponsor organization is well connected with the EU government.
I would encourage Mr. Taylor to evangelize Open Source software, something he's done successfully for a while. However, he does not have the credentials to represent the Linux, Open Source and Free Software developer communities, especially when he contradicts our extremely strong opposition to software patenting. While Mr. Taylor has been visible as a public speaker, it does not appear that he has any engagement with Open Source projects and developers, or that he brought this matter up with representative organizations such as the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative, and Software in the Public Interest. No legitimate Open Source representative would think of taking this sort of position with government without first holding a public consultation with the developer community.
Software patents could be fatal for Open Source software in the U.S. and Europe. Since we do not collect royalties from the distribution of our own software, we have no funds to pay royalties to patent holders. Rather than sue us to collect money, expect patent holders to sue Open Source developers to restrain them from distributing their software or carrying out further development. Companies that produce proprietary software would bring that sort of suit to kill us off as a competitor.
While we can sometimes work around a patented algorithm that we know about, the Open Source developer is not able to defend himself from patent infringement claims, even invalid ones. In the U.S., the cost of a patent infringement defense often exceeds US$500,000. The Open Source developer, an individual working on his own time, won't have the funds to defend himself. He will be compelled to settle with his accuser, regardless of the merits of the case, in order to preserve what assets the plaintiff deigns to leave him. The copyrights of his own software won't be among those assets.
We are especially threatened by royalty-bearing software patents that are embedded in industry standards. In many cases, it is impossible to achieve compliance with a standard without infringing upon the patented algorithms that are specified by that standard. Standard compliance is critical for interoperability, and thus software patents in standards can make an un-communicating island of a Linux system. For example, the IEEE 1488 FireWire standard is encumbered by patents that apply to the software interfacing to it, and a patent r
I believe that Richard Stallman wrote most of the original GNU C compiler, although it was derived partly from a portable optimizer from a 1978 Univeristy of Arizona research project.
"GNU `diff' was written by Mike Haertel, David Hayes, Richard Stallman, Len Tower, and Paul Eggert."
"GNU Make was written by Richard Stallman and Roland McGrath."
"Richard Stallman was the original author of GDB, and of many other GNU programs."
Basically, companies that can manufacture ink jet cartridges (relatively small products) but cannot manufacture their own printers can be locked out of the market, eliminating consumers' ability to choose to buy from these smaller companies.
I think you meant to say that IBM drives can be made to run quietly rather than silently, unless the amount of noise that they make is truely zero (which generally is true when the drive is spun down or turned off, but I don't think that is what you were referring to).
I don't buy the CIA connection theory, nor would I necessarily consider it to be a bad thing if it were true. It's just the connection with former president Bill Clinton that I find helpful in looking into who Judge Richard Stearns is.
There was nothing that I can recall in the original theatrical release of the Fellowship of the Ring that made me cringe (some of the material that in the Extended Release did, but that largely shows what a good job of editting was done in the Fellowship of Ring theatrical release). In comparison, there were several places in The Two Towers that made me cringe.
I believe that some negative refractive index lens had been made that worked for microwaves. I wonder if that would allow for much higher resolution microwave astronomy.
I have a Toshiba e740, which has built-in 802.11b wireless and CF and SDIO slots, but I haven't seen Linux for it and I haven't yet found the time to look into trying to port ARM Linux on it seriously, although I did see a posting to the effect that porting to the e740 is expected to be difficult to impossible because it is much less documented than the iPAQ.
So now I wonder if I should get the Zaurus. It has Linux with drivers for the Prism-based 802.11b wireless CF cards such as one from Socket (I believe all of the 802.11b cards on the market are prism based, but I'm not sure). However, that would mean using an SDIO camera, and I don't know of one with published specifications (for example, there is one from Veo, but Veo does not document the protocols used to talk to their Observer camera, which I made the mistake of buying).
If anyone cares to respond to this query, I would appreciate separate indications of whether a device has well documented hardware without need to sign a nondisclosure agreement and whether a device has a driver. If I would have to use a binary-only driver (which I regard as probably illegal anyhow), I would be tied running one particular kernel, and would therefore rather not buy it at all. On the other hand, with documented hardware, I could conceivably write a driver.
n.b.: Putting the controller logic back in the drive unit harkens back to the original In Drive Electronics approach.
I know you did not do this, but, just in case anyone wants to raise the moon treaty, "please note that the United States is a signatory to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, but did not sign the 1979 Moon Treaty." . I do not know if China is a signatory to either of these treaties.
I don't know how it is currently done, but I believe that a typical animal shelter (not a "no kill" shelter) kills many cats a day. If a shelter were going to kill a donor cat at a given time regardless of whether that cat was going to be an organ donor, then I don't think it would be crueler for them to instead do the donor surgery that the cat does not wake up from.
Both of my cats have ID chips, so I don't think an animal shelter would kill them as long as my phone still works, but, I think that if I found out that some pet of mine had been killed in a shelter due to a faulty ID chip or whatever, it would, if anything, console me a bit know that a kidney had been used to save another pet, provided that I was convinced that the demand for the kidney had not accelerated the time to kill my pet.
Perhaps dupes could just be demoted to not being on the front page.
I realize that sometime documentaries get their facts wrong. Perhaps the problem was really being caused by something else. I don't know.
You also seem to be very confused about the issue of an "uber-cvs" (which you seem to be confusing with file-based revision systems like SCCS and RCS--the "uber-cvs" part is not currently distributed separately from the rest of Aegis). I realize that Aegis does contain an "uber-cvs", to use your term. My point is that that functionality would have broader applicability as a separate software package.
Since you say "So you obviously didn't RTFM" and then completely ignore my point about all of the additional commands in the HOWTO, I don't think that you're reading my responses carefully enough so that it would be the a good prioritization of anyone's time for me to respond to you further. You may have the last word now if you like.
I have to admit, I was looking at the many commands in the howto and didn't notice that very few of them are in /usr/bin (where did they go?). Even so, aediff, aepatch, aeimport, and aecomp look rather fundamental. The "common commands" section of the howto lists 11 new commands, for example. I think it's fair to say that given that that the "aegis" program and the howto define two different command syntaxes for the same thing, somebody else must also have felt that there was something wrong with at least one of these syntaxes (both of which share the disadvantage of not being compatible with some other program like rcs or sccs in cases where that is possible).
It is irrelevant that you consider Aegis to be "a huge step forward from underlying, raw source-code management commands, and it is for far more important reasons than command-line syntax", because all I am saying is that making these commands incomptable in cases where the incompatability is unnecessary is an unnecessary disadvantage.
(If we're going to point out parts of the argument that are being ignored, though, I didn't see anything explaining why you think Aegis isn't separable from the underlying source-code management after I pointed out that it can be configured to use any package. :-)
What you call "underlying source-code management" is not what I was referring to. I said, "I'd like a cvs variant (incompatible if need be) that would suport atomic operations, symlinks, inode information, renaming files, and maybe some distributed development features." aegis apparently has a layer for representing these types of transactions (that operates on top of an existing file-based revision control system such as sccs or rcs). That layer is what I think should be separate, as I think it has much broader applicability.
I don't recall saying that I had found a case of Aegis not running as intended. I said I do not believe it would be a net savings of my time to adopt software that is intended to run that way (with logic bombs, unnecessary new syntax that is not a substantial improvement, etc.).
Maybe you should have payed more attention to the manual than to dissecting the source.
I don't know what you mean by this. I read much, but not all, of the documnetation in aegis/lib/en. Perhaps your meaning would be clearer if you could quote a passage of the documentation that solves, to my satisfaction, one of the problems that I referred to.
I never said that Aegis should "just pass-through" commands. If Aegis were to use, say, rcs-compatible commands where possible, I would still want it to use those commands even if it were using SCCS underneath (like BitKeeper). I also said "[I] would also consider incompatible command names and options to be worthwhile if the new syntax were a enough of a user interface improvement, but that doesn't seem to be the case here." Aegis installs 17 new programs (at least they begin with "ae") plus an "aegis" program that is designed to implement yet another command syntax in an attempt to ameliorate the complexity of the ae* programs.
Perhaps you feel that the argument syntax of these 17 new programs is a great improvement over cvs (but readers may notice that you don't explain why), in which case I'll leave it to interested readers to check out some of the aegis manual pages and form their own conclusions.
For me, I probably would be willing to climb the Aegis learning curve if the logic bomb issue were resolved, but I mention the unnecessary command line incompatability issue because other people may find this information useful when surveying source code control systems.
Users should be able to make that decision themselves. (It's also worth noting that, aegis, as shipped, also refused to run from my personal account because my user-id belong to group 0, "system".) Imagine if other development tool authors also inserted logic bombs to enforce their varying and probably conflicting system administration philosophies. I repeat:
Thanks for responding anyhow.