When some Debian user acts like a zealot, he's bound to take a fall, as is anyone who over-defends anything.
I - as a Debian user and developer - have no problem admitting that Debian has some problems, even though I do prefer the few organizational issues to some principle issue, which is the reason I've stuck with Debian so far and probably will keep doing so.
Debian is a big project and there is no shame in having problems, with such an ambitious modus operandi.
My call of FUD is aimed solely at the wording in the original post. It's like the following fictional post situation: "Slashdot is full of trolls and FUD, most of what is posted there are lies or exagerations" as opposed to: "Slashdot has, as any site of such proportions is bound to have, many users which pollute it's information base, but still, there is good information to be mined"
Maybe I find it so offensive because I never held Debian to such high standards as to not have problems. Big upgrade leaps have always been prone to problems, in every distribuition, due to the very nature of the complex package relationship.
I agree there are problems*, but the nature of machine upgrading is interactive, as such, the difference between "unusable service after upgrade" and "problem during upgrade, with services left operational" are enough to justify cautious wording when reporting said problems, not bold accusations of "severe breakage upon each and every upgrade", which is what it sounded to me.
* even though I haven't seen a scenario like the one you described, having upgraded 5 servers from vanilla Woody to Sarge, with SSH, Apache, MySQL, Courier, Bind, Samba and Amavis,
The problems do exist, but the "severe breakage" described does not implicate unbootable machines or unusable software. Cyclical dependencies mostly mean the algorithm used to select packages for upgrade or instalation will not run as expected and probably leave the problematic package on hold.
This is not a new problem and affects Debian mainly because of it's distributed and loosely coupled model of organization, where integration problems can go by unoticed for quite some time.
The original mail intended to push more developers into taking action about these integration errors and make sure the upgrade paths are always clear, which is a very big and important task.
I, for one, hope his message doesn't fall on deaf ears, but also hope it doesn't generate more FUD like this.
I'm going waaaay out of line here, but I imagine the slight possibility of SCO playing a double game here.
Microsoft's involvement has been thought of before, but imagine the scenario where both IBM and Microsoft are put against the wall and SCO's only looking for the highest bidder to get bought.
Goes like this: SCO sues IBM for some nonsense involving the GPL. It's quite obvious that IF this goes to court, SCO's gonna loose and that's possibly gonna set a precedent for the GPL in court and be a big bump for Linux on the mainstream press.
Microsoft, being one of the few who would get hurt by Linux growth (maybe the last after Novell integration) would seriously consider buying out SCO to silence it before this FUD causes more good publicity on Linux than it already has.
On the unlikely event of a court win, IBM would probably profit more from buying SCO than from paying all the licences.
In both cases SCO gets bought and for me this looks more likely than just an IBM buy out, since it explains the reason behind the absurd claims: if the press goes towards IBM, Microsoft buys SCO, if the press goes against IBM, it buys SCO itself.
my paranoid and over creative $0.00000002
--
- I wish life was like a *nix variant...
- What for? You wouldn't be r00t!
(long post, sorry if I sound offensive, it's just MHO)
One of the things I despise about the US (I refer to the whole country, not specific individuals, there's a lot of nice North Americans) is treating other countries like caddle, and those that do not conform to the caddle paradigm, as wolves. Cuba and many middle east countries that have no affairs whatsoever with the US, just because they do not lower their heads to the international imperialism imposed by the US Govt. are treated as enemies and targeted for oppression and hatred.
Why do many North Americans hate Cuba? They never bombed the US, they never tried to limit US's freedom in any way (of course they could, if they had the power to, but that's not the point. I'm assuming there's no intention at all of doing so) and still, the US target them as being a "potential threat".
I must agree with the idea that "the price for freedom is eternal vigilance", but being vigilant means keeping you eyes open to what surounds you, not bombing everyone that doesn't agree with your way of living!
Keeping your eyes open and being well informed would soon reveal to you that Fidel Castro never had any terrorist background, and most of the actions he took were aimed at securing his country from outer problems. (no I'm not Cuban and I'm not saying they're perfect, but I think they deserve they're space to do what they wish to themselves - not to others, like the US)
You (everyone) should realize that Comunism, Socialism, Democracy and many other minor social arquitectures are all responses to the same human need: to interact, to build a society with the smallest number of intrinsecal illnesses. None of them are bad in principle, but ALL of them are corruptible, and can be distorted and transformed into something bad for the masses or bad for the individual.
The article mentioned about the international terrorist network is IMHO bullshit. I could be wrong, but since it recieved a lot of negative reviews from people I consider well-informed and good judges of values, I'm inclined to believe it's just paranoia of change, since Lula's not your avarage politician, he has as uncommon background for a president and many people (me included) doubt he could be a good president, but that doesn't in any way indicate he has terrorist connections neither does it indicate that he'll be a dictator of any sort and ban elections, it's kindda hard to do that in a country as big as Brazil, and doing so is very far from his presidential plans, the population would not condone with such a lie and a re-write of what happend back in 1992 with Collor would happen again, a president would be thrown off.
What he DOES have is a strong sindical background, and let's remember that without sindicates, we would all be working 12 hours a day (I still do, out of stupidity =] ), there would be NO minimum wage and and the socitety as a whole would be even more inclined towards the BOSS and less towards the WORKER.
I'll stop my rant now, I'm mumbled too much. But I must say that in terms of technology the brazilian election is doing great, I can only hope that the kind of mockery that happened in Florida doesn't repeat itself in Brazil and that the next US general elections turn out to be better then the last one, because, just as anyone else, the US needs democracy, and it's still far from it.
First we recognize that there is an enormous ammount os bandwidth to deal with
Then we note that appart from the big numbers before the comma, there are also quite a handfull of numbers after the comma that can be used to make the frequency more and more accurate like 9,02312434252535266 Hz can be one usable independant frequency and 9,02312434252535267 be a whole other issue...
Well...we fall back on the "how precise is our technology" subject that can (theoretically) go around forever.... i guess....
OK, Im no PHD, so I really dont know how much of my bullshit is actually usefull, but doesnt hurt to comment my thoughts...:-)
I dont know about you guys, but to me, this Press Release is kindda "vague" (still trying to be "vogue"...:-) )
It really doesnt say ANYTHING tangible about the "new" P4 instructions or anything detailed at all !
whatever...hope to hear more about this soon....even though it wont make me actually BUY a Pentium instead of an AMD (or even Cyrix)... but let them try...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
...so much for Opposites Attract.
Take that Paula Abdul!
--
nü!
"the closed source community" ??
yeah, that's like saying "the borg individuality"!
When some Debian user acts like a zealot, he's bound to take a fall, as is anyone who over-defends anything.
I - as a Debian user and developer - have no problem admitting that Debian has some problems, even though I do prefer the few organizational issues to some principle issue, which is the reason I've stuck with Debian so far and probably will keep doing so.
Debian is a big project and there is no shame in having problems, with such an ambitious modus operandi.
My call of FUD is aimed solely at the wording in the original post. It's like the following fictional post situation:
"Slashdot is full of trolls and FUD, most of what is posted there are lies or exagerations"
as opposed to:
"Slashdot has, as any site of such proportions is bound to have, many users which pollute it's information base, but still, there is good information to be mined"
Maybe I find it so offensive because I never held Debian to such high standards as to not have problems. Big upgrade leaps have always been prone to problems, in every distribuition, due to the very nature of the complex package relationship.
FUD != Lie
I agree there are problems*, but the nature of machine upgrading is interactive, as such, the difference between "unusable service after upgrade" and "problem during upgrade, with services left operational" are enough to justify cautious wording when reporting said problems, not bold accusations of "severe breakage upon each and every upgrade", which is what it sounded to me.
* even though I haven't seen a scenario like the one you described, having upgraded 5 servers from vanilla Woody to Sarge, with SSH, Apache, MySQL, Courier, Bind, Samba and Amavis,
This is FUD, even by Slashdot standards.
The problems do exist, but the "severe breakage" described does not implicate unbootable machines or unusable software. Cyclical dependencies mostly mean the algorithm used to select packages for upgrade or instalation will not run as expected and probably leave the problematic package on hold.
This is not a new problem and affects Debian mainly because of it's distributed and loosely coupled model of organization, where integration problems can go by unoticed for quite some time.
The original mail intended to push more developers into taking action about these integration errors and make sure the upgrade paths are always clear, which is a very big and important task.
I, for one, hope his message doesn't fall on deaf ears, but also hope it doesn't generate more FUD like this.
I'm going waaaay out of line here, but I imagine the slight possibility of SCO playing a double game here.
Microsoft's involvement has been thought of before, but imagine the scenario where both IBM and Microsoft are put against the wall and SCO's only looking for the highest bidder to get bought.
Goes like this: SCO sues IBM for some nonsense involving the GPL. It's quite obvious that IF this goes to court, SCO's gonna loose and that's possibly gonna set a precedent for the GPL in court and be a big bump for Linux on the mainstream press.
Microsoft, being one of the few who would get hurt by Linux growth (maybe the last after Novell integration) would seriously consider buying out SCO to silence it before this FUD causes more good publicity on Linux than it already has.
On the unlikely event of a court win, IBM would probably profit more from buying SCO than from paying all the licences.
In both cases SCO gets bought and for me this looks more likely than just an IBM buy out, since it explains the reason behind the absurd claims: if the press goes towards IBM, Microsoft buys SCO, if the press goes against IBM, it buys SCO itself.
my paranoid and over creative $0.00000002
--
- I wish life was like a *nix variant...
- What for? You wouldn't be r00t!
Why not make your own HOW-TO?
Next step: first Tux on the moon!
(long post, sorry if I sound offensive, it's just MHO)
One of the things I despise about the US (I refer to the whole country, not specific individuals, there's a lot of nice North Americans) is treating other countries like caddle, and those that do not conform to the caddle paradigm, as wolves.
Cuba and many middle east countries that have no affairs whatsoever with the US, just because they do not lower their heads to the international imperialism imposed by the US Govt. are treated as enemies and targeted for oppression and hatred.
Why do many North Americans hate Cuba? They never bombed the US, they never tried to limit US's freedom in any way (of course they could, if they had the power to, but that's not the point. I'm assuming there's no intention at all of doing so) and still, the US target them as being a "potential threat".
I must agree with the idea that "the price for freedom is eternal vigilance", but being vigilant means keeping you eyes open to what surounds you, not bombing everyone that doesn't agree with your way of living!
Keeping your eyes open and being well informed would soon reveal to you that Fidel Castro never had any terrorist background, and most of the actions he took were aimed at securing his country from outer problems. (no I'm not Cuban and I'm not saying they're perfect, but I think they deserve they're space to do what they wish to themselves - not to others, like the US)
You (everyone) should realize that Comunism, Socialism, Democracy and many other minor social arquitectures are all responses to the same human need: to interact, to build a society with the smallest number of intrinsecal illnesses. None of them are bad in principle, but ALL of them are corruptible, and can be distorted and transformed into something bad for the masses or bad for the individual.
The article mentioned about the international terrorist network is IMHO bullshit. I could be wrong, but since it recieved a lot of negative reviews from people I consider well-informed and good judges of values, I'm inclined to believe it's just paranoia of change, since Lula's not your avarage politician, he has as uncommon background for a president and many people (me included) doubt he could be a good president, but that doesn't in any way indicate he has terrorist connections neither does it indicate that he'll be a dictator of any sort and ban elections, it's kindda hard to do that in a country as big as Brazil, and doing so is very far from his presidential plans, the population would not condone with such a lie and a re-write of what happend back in 1992 with Collor would happen again, a president would be thrown off.
What he DOES have is a strong sindical background, and let's remember that without sindicates, we would all be working 12 hours a day (I still do, out of stupidity =] ), there would be NO minimum wage and and the socitety as a whole would be even more inclined towards the BOSS and less towards the WORKER.
I'll stop my rant now, I'm mumbled too much.
But I must say that in terms of technology the brazilian election is doing great, I can only hope that the kind of mockery that happened in Florida doesn't repeat itself in Brazil and that the next US general elections turn out to be better then the last one, because, just as anyone else, the US needs democracy, and it's still far from it.
OK
First we recognize that there is an enormous ammount os bandwidth to deal with
Then we note that appart from the big numbers before the comma, there are also quite a handfull of numbers after the comma that can be used to make the frequency more and more accurate like 9,02312434252535266 Hz can be one usable independant frequency and 9,02312434252535267 be a whole other issue...
Well...we fall back on the "how precise is our technology" subject that can (theoretically) go around forever.... i guess....
OK, Im no PHD, so I really dont know how much of my bullshit is actually usefull, but doesnt hurt to comment my thoughts... :-)
I dont know about you guys, but to me, this Press Release is kindda "vague" (still trying to be "vogue"... :-) )
It really doesnt say ANYTHING tangible about the "new" P4 instructions or anything detailed at all !
whatever...hope to hear more about this soon....even though it wont make me actually BUY a Pentium instead of an AMD (or even Cyrix)... but let them try... :-)