I'll second this. The hacker's diet is great... there's 5 of us in my office doing it, and we're all losing weight steadily.
Not only that, we're not killing ourselves over it. Losing weight a few pounds a week because you've permanently changed the way you eat is healthy. Losing it too quickly on these one-track-mind fad diets is unsustainable and dangerous ("too much of anything is a bad thing").
The things in the hacker's diet make sense, and are very obvious once you read it. The difference with his "method" is he gives you the tools to properly track your progress to beat the psychological ups and downs of losing weight.
The issue is not that they put out a "fix", it's that they put out a fix + a bunch of other new and untested-in-the-wild code.
On stable, production machines, I don't want to update to foo-bar version ++32, I want the exact same thing that I run now that is stable and otherwise tested, but with the security fix applied.
I'm sure all these new features in the latest OpenSSH version are great, but until people can test them longer than a small core of OpenBSD developers running from CVS, there's no way in hell I'm replacing my otherwise stable and working version. I'm going to patch the one thing that's exploitable right away, and then *test* the new version, and release when it's confirmed to be OK and stable in my environment.
I would much prefer #2, so that I can fix it immediately, and the evaluate the next full release that properly incorporates those changes.
And here I thought it was because his last good album was _Everything Is Wrong_ and his core fans stopped buying his albums when they started sucking.
Re:There is nothing wrong with RPMs. Only packager
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 1
Nope, it's been that way for quite a while... certainly since RedHat 6.0, but I'm pretty sure it was back as far as 4.x, even.
Re:There is nothing wrong with RPMs. Only packager
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 1
For the first, you're right, the debian way makes more sense. Mandrake went through a huge overhaul in the 7.x to 8.x series to use debian-style library packages, but RedHat has not done this yet.
As for #2, you can most certainly build RPMs as a user other than root. The Mandrake RPM Howto has the most concise explanation of how to do it... it's only a couple lines in a configuration file in your home directory.
Re:There is nothing wrong with RPMs. Only packager
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 1
You would need to make an APT repository for it (in the same way the apt4rpm guys made redhat 7.x repositories).
I have my own, but it's not for public use... I don't have that kind of bandwidth. =)
There is nothing wrong with RPMs. Only packagers.
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The author mentions, "On the other hand, have you noticed how hard it is to find Debian ISO images?" Yes, Debian is very upgradable, but that has nothing to do with the percieved shortcomings of the RPM package format.
The RPM format is nearly identical feature-for-feature with Debian's dpkg. RPM's upgradability has nothing to do with technical issues. There are three things that make Debian's package management so much better than RPM-based distributions.
The first is, there are way more distributions based on RPM packages than deb's. It's not suprising that some of them are more incompatible with each other than any debian release has ever been. Sure, there are many more people with hairy backs in the US than there are in Lichtenstein, that doesn't mean that living in the US causes hair to grow on your back. He is inferring causality where it doesn't exist.
Second, APT. APT is what makes debian's package management so smart, not dpkg. And, in fact, this isn't a reason at all. APT now works with RPM packages, and when dependencies are properly configured, it is every bit as good as it is on debian. You can make an APT repository with RedHat's "rawhide" distribution and upgrade daily if you want. You won't have any more upgrade issues than you would running debian unstable. It may break occasionally, but it's when large changes happen. The exact same thing happens on the debian side.
Third, Debian is fanatical about consistency. Most debian packagers manage maybe three or four packages (there are exceptions, of course). When you devote all of your free time to just a few things like that, a lot of attention is payed to details. This is what truly makes Debian's package management so freakin' clean. It has nothing to do with technology, it has everything to do with each maintainer hand-crafting dependencies and build options very carefully.
The thing that pretty much any of the RPM-based distributions is truly missing is the equivalent of the Debian package maintainer guidelines, and a culture that enforces it. If that existed, RedHat would be just as consistent and upgradable as debian.
I use RedHat and I'm careful about what I put on my system, and I never run into upgrade issues. If I'm going to install something that is for a distribution other than mine, I build from.src.rpm's instead of binaries and I *know* it's compatible with my install. Someday, if packagers stop being idiots and using shortcuts, I won't have to. Everything will resolve properly in the huge worldwide-apt-rpm-uber-archive.
If I produce software, music, or writings, these are the results of my work and efforts, and nobody is entitled to steal them!
But CDs aren't the results of your work. The music, or words, are. If I, as an artist, burn a CD of my music, and give it to someone, I have lost nothing other than the 50 cents for the media. The music in my head has not gone away.
Intellectual property is no less than private property.
Yes, intellectual property is arguably property, but the mistake is in treating it exactly like physical property.
The problem is not in the idea of "intellectual property" (referencing the originator of a work, acknowledging the creativity that went into it), but in the mistake of using the word property which has connotations that don't directly apply to the very different ideas of a physical thing (a piece of land, a car, a radio), and an idea.
How would you feel if someone stole your computer because presumably they have a better use for it?
If someone stole my computer, I would no longer have the use of my computer. But if I write a song and someone tapes me singing it, what have I lost?
I write music, and I make no money off of it, because I like the idea of people listening to my music. Artists will produce music even if they can't eat off money made from selling CDs. "Artists" who are paid to manufacture generic music for mass-sale will probably go away, but that won't stop real music from happening. It will just stop non-musicians who have a career in music.
Now it may be that in the future, society will agree as a whole that using someone else's intellectual property (singing someone else's song, manufacturing drugs using someone else's formula) will be considered a form of stealing, but it is a mistake to consider it the same form of stealing as taking another person's computer, or stealing their car. That is what exists now, it's too rooted in laws of physical appropriation for it to apply to reality, and that is where these arguments start. When people discuss "stealing" IP they're really talking about two different things.
...It started out as my obsessive desire to be able to use konsole instead of Terminal.app on OSX. Once we got things working we realized it would be really handy to get things working on Darwin as well, so we asked the OpenDarwin folks if they wanted to host the Darwin KDE tree.
Yes it is possible, one of the other guys on our porting team has gotten it running, we're now working on incorporating those bits so it's reproducable.:)
That's one of the reasons we moved things over to OpenDarwin rather than keeping it just in Fink, is so the Darwin folks can take advantage of it as well...
I actually had no intention of buying a Game Cube, but I played Super Monkey Ball at my friend's place over Christmas and had ended up buying one the next day.
There's a reasonable number of good games for the GameCube (and Mario Kart's coming -- that's reason enough to buy it right there!), but I'm not kidding, it's worth getting one even if Super Monkey Ball is the only game you get...
PS2 has better simulation/action games, XBox has more "PC-like" games, but GameCube has all the games that are fun with a group of people at a party.
I didn't either... I got them off ADC just like everyone else... It's just that I saw the beta tools announced just last week, and I thought it was a bit crazy to be announcing the final version shortly after. =)
What he was asking is, "wouldn't it be great if there was a single API for windowing that could use Tk, wx, Gtk, Qt, or whatever, as it's backend automatically, depending on what's available?" As in, a *single* perl API for all windowing toolkits.
So if thousands of people don't find it hard to use, and say so, and hundreds of thousands of people do find it hard to use, but never tell them, what are the developers going to think?
I'm not saying you *have* to have "community spirit", I'm just saying that if you don't, don't complain that the software never gets the features you want.
OK, yes, you *do* have the right to say whatever you want, but don't expect anything to come of complaining about it without constructive criticism.
You don't have to know how to bake bread to tell the baker "I like my bread made such-and-such way."
The article highlights one of the problems with Open Source software today[...]
I can finish that sentence: "just because the writers at large popular online magazines can download something for free (and for Free), they feel that it's ok for them to bitch about how Open Source software isn't up to snuff, and yet they never try to make things better."
I'd bet he hasn't entered one "enhancement" bug report, reported one request to the mailing list, or done anything else to make gnupg better.
I work for a company whose product is open source. We have only so many developer hours to devote to feature enhancements. Guess which things get priority first? Either suggestions from support customers, or requests for features on our discussion list. If no one asks for it, it doesn't show up on our list of things to do.
Just because you can't code doesn't mean you can't contribute. Make docs, try to find bugs, make feature requests. Shut up or put your money where your mouth is.
Slashdot Mirror
http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/
I'll second this. The hacker's diet is great... there's 5 of us in my office doing it, and we're all losing weight steadily.
Not only that, we're not killing ourselves over it. Losing weight a few pounds a week because you've permanently changed the way you eat is healthy. Losing it too quickly on these one-track-mind fad diets is unsustainable and dangerous ("too much of anything is a bad thing").
The things in the hacker's diet make sense, and are very obvious once you read it. The difference with his "method" is he gives you the tools to properly track your progress to beat the psychological ups and downs of losing weight.
The issue is not that they put out a "fix", it's that they put out a fix + a bunch of other new and untested-in-the-wild code.
On stable, production machines, I don't want to update to foo-bar version ++32, I want the exact same thing that I run now that is stable and otherwise tested, but with the security fix applied.
I'm sure all these new features in the latest OpenSSH version are great, but until people can test them longer than a small core of OpenBSD developers running from CVS, there's no way in hell I'm replacing my otherwise stable and working version. I'm going to patch the one thing that's exploitable right away, and then *test* the new version, and release when it's confirmed to be OK and stable in my environment.
I would much prefer #2, so that I can fix it immediately, and the evaluate the next full release that properly incorporates those changes.
And here I thought it was because his last good album was _Everything Is Wrong_ and his core fans stopped buying his albums when they started sucking.
Nope, it's been that way for quite a while... certainly since RedHat 6.0, but I'm pretty sure it was back as far as 4.x, even.
For the first, you're right, the debian way makes more sense. Mandrake went through a huge overhaul in the 7.x to 8.x series to use debian-style library packages, but RedHat has not done this yet.
As for #2, you can most certainly build RPMs as a user other than root. The Mandrake RPM Howto has the most concise explanation of how to do it... it's only a couple lines in a configuration file in your home directory.
You would need to make an APT repository for it (in the same way the apt4rpm guys made redhat 7.x repositories).
I have my own, but it's not for public use... I don't have that kind of bandwidth. =)
The author mentions, "On the other hand, have you noticed how hard it is to find Debian ISO images?" Yes, Debian is very upgradable, but that has nothing to do with the percieved shortcomings of the RPM package format.
The RPM format is nearly identical feature-for-feature with Debian's dpkg. RPM's upgradability has nothing to do with technical issues. There are three things that make Debian's package management so much better than RPM-based distributions.
The first is, there are way more distributions based on RPM packages than deb's. It's not suprising that some of them are more incompatible with each other than any debian release has ever been. Sure, there are many more people with hairy backs in the US than there are in Lichtenstein, that doesn't mean that living in the US causes hair to grow on your back. He is inferring causality where it doesn't exist.
Second, APT. APT is what makes debian's package management so smart, not dpkg. And, in fact, this isn't a reason at all. APT now works with RPM packages, and when dependencies are properly configured, it is every bit as good as it is on debian. You can make an APT repository with RedHat's "rawhide" distribution and upgrade daily if you want. You won't have any more upgrade issues than you would running debian unstable. It may break occasionally, but it's when large changes happen. The exact same thing happens on the debian side.
Third, Debian is fanatical about consistency. Most debian packagers manage maybe three or four packages (there are exceptions, of course). When you devote all of your free time to just a few things like that, a lot of attention is payed to details. This is what truly makes Debian's package management so freakin' clean. It has nothing to do with technology, it has everything to do with each maintainer hand-crafting dependencies and build options very carefully.
The thing that pretty much any of the RPM-based distributions is truly missing is the equivalent of the Debian package maintainer guidelines, and a culture that enforces it. If that existed, RedHat would be just as consistent and upgradable as debian.
I use RedHat and I'm careful about what I put on my system, and I never run into upgrade issues. If I'm going to install something that is for a distribution other than mine, I build from .src.rpm's instead of binaries and I *know* it's compatible with my install. Someday, if packagers stop being idiots and using shortcuts, I won't have to. Everything will resolve properly in the huge worldwide-apt-rpm-uber-archive.
If I produce software, music, or writings, these are the results of my work and efforts, and nobody is entitled to steal them!
But CDs aren't the results of your work. The music, or words, are. If I, as an artist, burn a CD of my music, and give it to someone, I have lost nothing other than the 50 cents for the media. The music in my head has not gone away.
Intellectual property is no less than private property.
Yes, intellectual property is arguably property, but the mistake is in treating it exactly like physical property.
The problem is not in the idea of "intellectual property" (referencing the originator of a work, acknowledging the creativity that went into it), but in the mistake of using the word property which has connotations that don't directly apply to the very different ideas of a physical thing (a piece of land, a car, a radio), and an idea.
How would you feel if someone stole your computer because presumably they have a better use for it?
If someone stole my computer, I would no longer have the use of my computer. But if I write a song and someone tapes me singing it, what have I lost?
I write music, and I make no money off of it, because I like the idea of people listening to my music. Artists will produce music even if they can't eat off money made from selling CDs. "Artists" who are paid to manufacture generic music for mass-sale will probably go away, but that won't stop real music from happening. It will just stop non-musicians who have a career in music.
Now it may be that in the future, society will agree as a whole that using someone else's intellectual property (singing someone else's song, manufacturing drugs using someone else's formula) will be considered a form of stealing, but it is a mistake to consider it the same form of stealing as taking another person's computer, or stealing their car. That is what exists now, it's too rooted in laws of physical appropriation for it to apply to reality, and that is where these arguments start. When people discuss "stealing" IP they're really talking about two different things.
I would really like to give it a shot, just haven't had the chance yet. I have a feeling it will be non-trivial to do...
The port begain before OpenDarwin existed... =)
Assuming you're not accessing it with a sourceforge account, and you're just using anonymous access, you can do:
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.fink.sourceforge.ne t:/cvsroot/fink/login
(sorry, slashdot splits up the line no matter what I do, that should be "sourceforge.net", no space)
The nice thing about rootless X is, you can run those spiffy KDE apps without tarnishing the rest of your Aqua desktop... =)
You don't *have* to run the whole KDE desktop to use this stuff, you can just use the apps you're interested in.
Yes it is possible, one of the other guys on our porting team has gotten it running, we're now working on incorporating those bits so it's reproducable. :)
That's one of the reasons we moved things over to OpenDarwin rather than keeping it just in Fink, is so the Darwin folks can take advantage of it as well...
Yeah, it's not 100% but we've got things mostly working. I've got screenshots (including KDE in rootless mode, very nice =) up at my web page.
I'll second this.
I actually had no intention of buying a Game Cube, but I played Super Monkey Ball at my friend's place over Christmas and had ended up buying one the next day.
There's a reasonable number of good games for the GameCube (and Mario Kart's coming -- that's reason enough to buy it right there!), but I'm not kidding, it's worth getting one even if Super Monkey Ball is the only game you get...
PS2 has better simulation/action games, XBox has more "PC-like" games, but GameCube has all the games that are fun with a group of people at a party.
Of course, Windowlicker (the Aphex Twin CD this trick is on) is 3 years old...
Actually, it was UNIX. That was that OpenGL demo thing that comes with SGI boxen that nobody actually ever ever EVER used for anything important. =)
Of course, all the visible computers in the movie (in the background and such) were macs, so it still looked weird...
I didn't either... I got them off ADC just like everyone else... It's just that I saw the beta tools announced just last week, and I thought it was a bit crazy to be announcing the final version shortly after. =)
...and here I was thinking "wow, that was a short beta period!", but it turns out these are still the BETA april developer tools.
You're still not answering his question...
What he was asking is, "wouldn't it be great if there was a single API for windowing that could use Tk, wx, Gtk, Qt, or whatever, as it's backend automatically, depending on what's available?" As in, a *single* perl API for all windowing toolkits.
Like fidelity is terribly important for the PC Squeeker. =)
So if thousands of people don't find it hard to use, and say so, and hundreds of thousands of people do find it hard to use, but never tell them, what are the developers going to think?
I'm not saying you *have* to have "community spirit", I'm just saying that if you don't, don't complain that the software never gets the features you want.
OK, yes, you *do* have the right to say whatever you want, but don't expect anything to come of complaining about it without constructive criticism. You don't have to know how to bake bread to tell the baker "I like my bread made such-and-such way."
The article highlights one of the problems with Open Source software today[...]
I can finish that sentence: "just because the writers at large popular online magazines can download something for free (and for Free), they feel that it's ok for them to bitch about how Open Source software isn't up to snuff, and yet they never try to make things better."
I'd bet he hasn't entered one "enhancement" bug report, reported one request to the mailing list, or done anything else to make gnupg better.
I work for a company whose product is open source. We have only so many developer hours to devote to feature enhancements. Guess which things get priority first? Either suggestions from support customers, or requests for features on our discussion list. If no one asks for it, it doesn't show up on our list of things to do.
Just because you can't code doesn't mean you can't contribute. Make docs, try to find bugs, make feature requests. Shut up or put your money where your mouth is.