chattr +i makes the file immutable, +u makes it so when the file is deleted, the contents are saved.
or if you're in the BSD land, then it's chflags schg to make the file system immutable, sunlnk to make it system undeleteable, or ucgh/uunlink for user immutable/un-deleteable versions of the above. ----------------------------
A rich XML based syntax? Just a pet peeve of mine, but why does everything have to be XML based? It's like Microsoft saying that C++ is the first language to have the ability to have XML-based comments embedded in the code. Yep, it is. But is =head1 really any better or worse than ?
As for your requests for functionality, perhaps you should read Installation and package tools document, version 1.0 by jkh over at the FreeBSD side of the world. While I know I'll be burned at the stake for saying good things about FreeBSD on slashdot, that document has some excellent thoughts which the Linux world could also benefit from. ----------------------------
ask why a new version of a package was released? see a list of changes between old and new versions?
Well, RPM does include a Changelog which should include why the package was released, and what changes were made. check the --changelog option.
tell the system to apply only security or high-priority fixes?
You can do this mostly by installing a distro, and then tracking a particular version of it. Redhat-6.2 has lots of updates, but all of them fall into your 'security/high-priority' category.
tell the system to automatically process all updates except those involving specified packages, which I want to approve on a case-by-case basis?
It's trivial to setup something like this where you mirror the appropriate dir on updates.redhat.com, then have a script which does an rpm -F foo.rpm on every rpm whose name isn't listed in 'no-auto-upgrade.txt'. However, given your original statement, it's not possible. You're saying that you want it to automatically everything, except it should psychically know what you want to pick and choose from. Ummm... no matter how you cut it, you'll at some point have to tell the system 'upgrade or no'.
tell the system never to upgrade packages that require upgrades of packages used by other software (eg, libraries)?
This is the default behavior of RPM. You have to use --nodeps to override it.
ask for packages that will help me convert GIF files to PNG?
You want natural language capability search built into your package manager? You've watched too much star trek. If however you did a quick search for RPMs that contained both 'GIF' and 'PNG' in their name on a site like rpmfind.net you'd find
gif2png is readily available.
ask for only packages targeted at beginners?
I have no idea what use this is. Beginner is a very broad term. Is Enlightenment aimed at beginners? How about Windowmaker? The answer for both is a resounding maybe!, depending on the configuration. How about gcc, is that for beginners? After all, most computer barely-literates don't know how to use a compiler. And bind, that's definitely an advanced package right? unless of course you install a caching-nameserver rpm that helps the beginner have their own caching nameserver, then it's beginner. Or an obvious beginner package like grip, whcih isn't beginner at all, i mean, you have to know about mp3 encoders and cd rippers.
ask for only well-integrated, well-tested packages?
Use RedHat, they'll only give you these. If you stick to basics, unless you use Mandrake, you usually won't get anything that's not well-tested and integrated.
get reviews of a package?
Ah yes, all programs expand until they read mail. Or in your case, you're asking for the package manager to read newsgroups and mailing lists, so it'd be a newsreader too. Maybe we should just integrate this package manager of yours into emacs.
find out how to get started using a package?
The RPM format allows for certain files to be flagged as documentation and generally installs them in the path/usr/doc/$rpm_name. and man files in/usr/man. you can get a list of what it installed by doing rpm -qi package_name.
begin browsing the documentation for a package before approving a full installation?
again, you're asking the package manager to do things that just don't make sense. Why not read up on the software, then install it? Or just install it, and if it's no use to you, do an 'rpm -e'.
have some help in configuration updates?
These are called man pages, and documentation files. You read them and they help you. Or hell, if reading real documentation is too much work for you, then see if there's a HOWTO that you can peruse somewhere on the net.
Personally I use FreeBSD which has it's own unique set of strengths and weaknesses, and if you don't think anybody out there is thinking about this stuff, you should read this document which is a summary of the state of these things in FreeBSD, and some ideas on how to progress.
yes, I was being facetious, and also attempting to demonstrate exactly how to get a poll with results like that. The poll simply notes that it's the results of the sample polled, saying nothing about how they obtained the sample. If they just took people from the main line, then of course everybody has at least $50k in the market.
On a related note, a book I think everybody who doesn't understand statistics should take is the classic book How to lie with Statistics. For the less mathematical person, it's a good way of showing just how easily and subtly one can shift the results of those fail-proof statistics. ----------------------------
I can get you those results in a poll too, I'll just use residents from the place I call home. Haverford, PA, a suburb of Philly where the average home costs $600k and the average household income most definitely isn't $40k. ----------------------------
pine is easy to use, reliable, supports HTML formatting and has no problem with attachments. It's MIME support works wonderfully to launch the appropriate viewers as neccessary for them.
----------------------------
That's absolutely not true. The +50 cap has eliminated incentive for a large population of the/. audiance to make meaningful posts, as there's no benefit, and it also means that if you get a post that gets moderated to 5 then marked down to 4 as overrated, you lose karma.
I'm not sure what the goal of the +50 cap is, but all it really does, short term, is encourage trolling by +2 posters, and long-term it eliminates the possibility of filtering by karma with an nntp-type interface. Some of us might want to never read anything by somebody with over 1k karma, for example. Fortunately most +2 posters don't abuse their privilege. ----------------------------
meaningful project: yes, there are lots of meaningful projects. Perhaps you should work on one now, rather than post to the timesuck which is/.
enlightenment on a palm iii: I'd love to see this, mostly for the hardware hacks which would have to be accomplished first.
If you've never wasted time on a technical project solely because you wanted to see if you could do it, then you probably aren't that good of a geek anyway. I think most geeks have done some ludicrously unproductive things solely as mental exercises or even just as jokes. Who cares? If you want them to be productive then start a company and hire them. Until then, no, you're not their manager. ----------------------------
The above poster does make a point though, that while Vint Cerf has done some astoundingly impressive things in his career, his current employment is as "a suit", and his employment has never once been related to privacy or security concerns.
I'm not attempting to trivialize his accomplishments in the computing field, but honestly I just don't see why his opinion matters in this case.
And by the way, since when is 12,000 a really low/. number? ----------------------------
yeah, but professional athletes have better skillz. you're trying to keep people out just because they've got skillz. who wants the olympics to sux0r? I like the olympics almost as much as i like pepsi... mmmm... pepsi. ----------------------------
1) works with binaries. you can use pkg_add binary_package to install a binary, and to build a binary package, just 'make package' from the appropriate ports directory.
2) figures out dependencies auto-magically and downloads all the required libraries.
3) doesn't handle upgrades nicely, you have to do a pkg_delete foo ; pkg_add foo combination to upgrade.
lastly, apt stands for 'advanced package tool', something that 'man 8 apt' would've told you. ----------------------------
Sure they'll find me, as long as I'm not using a hacked account in.cz or.ru, and sending the SMS messages through a web or e-mail gateway. This is like every other hack in the book, where they'll find you if you're dumb, but any sysadmin or network admin worth their salt could do it, if they were so inclined.
Fortunately though, most people with the skills to cause such hassles also realize that it's just plain dumb to do such things. ----------------------------
Must your desktop computer be online at all times? Must it have zero down time? If not, please give me your IP address, and a vulnerability which causes you to do a full reset on your computer. I'll write an appropriate exploit.
Here's how to turn it into a true DoS.
while(1){
crashPhone();
sleep(120);
}
Now as you were noting about this not being a DoS attack, could you please give me your Nokia phone's SMS e-mail gateway address?
Then why hasn't the MPAA/DVDCCA authorized any Linux/OSS developers to use CSS?
Actually if you read the DVDCCA FAQ you'll find that Sigma Designs has plans and a license to make a Linux DVD player. Non open-source, but it's something anyway.
Compaq still has a 'Compaq diagnostics' partition on the Proliant servers, but it doesn't inhibit the use of Linux at all. It's simply so that if you hit F10 on boot you can get to a bunch of their utilities, no matter what OS you run.
To show it, here's output from fdisk on/dev/ida/c0d0: /dev/ida/c0d0p1 * 10 138 526320 83 Linux /dev/ida/c0d0p2 139 2176 8315040 5 Extended /dev/ida/c0d0p3 1 9 36704 12 Compaq diagnostics
1 - You seem biased against VxWorks, did you have a bad experience with it?
2 - i've seen qnx4 crash horridly.
3 - nope, it's a real bug. if you pester qnx enough, and give them enough money eventually they'll tell you that they lose the ability to guaranteee it will meet deadlines during forks.
4 - nope, not completely posix. sed is broken, to name the first bug i discovered in it.
5 - yes, but vxworks has a slightly more sane licensing scheme, if only slightly.
6 - yep, debugging and such on vxworks isn't as simple as it is on qnx, but i had to use ice to find the fork latency bug. that's not what I call easy either.
I don't claim that making an RT-OS is easy, but I don't understand why/.'ers love QNX. It's not gratis (to use for real), it's not libre, and it doesn't offer any significant capabilities that are unique solely to the system. My point was simply that for people who are just toying around and learning about RT-OS's, why not help develop something that fits in with the ideals that/.'ers allegedly hold in high regard. ----------------------------
You're insinuating that slashdot is full of idiots who only do things for ego, and that quality posts will disappear solely because of limited karma. This notion is patently rediculous.
Slashdot is a community built on a unique spirit, and there's no way that people with large amounts of karma are going to burn their karma with posts that don't say anything useful, just because they can't get more anymore. ----------------------------
I am referring to the QNX4 kernel. Do you have experience with the new version, and most importantly, have they fixed the obnoxious 'i'm forking therefore you may experience unexpected latency of' bug?
I was writing an app where latency over 3ms would crash the hardware (bad hardware, i know) and this one bit me hard, and left a bad bad taste in my mouth. ----------------------------
I really don't understand what the big deal is about QNX. It's not as interesting as VxWorks, it's not as stable as... well anything. It's buggy as all hell, and it only is guaranteed to meet deadlines if you don't fork. (try it, it's true, it can blow deadlines by up to 40ms under certain circumstances)
It's kind of like unix, but different enough to bite you in the ass a lot, and make it so you have to do porting work on anything normal that you'd want to run.
Photon is a nice windowing system, but it's not worth running qnx for.
It's non-free in the libre sense, and it's ludicrously expensive to use commercially. Actually it's this bizarre 'points' system where grep might be 3 points to release it, and whatever, and they charge per point, some negotiated fee.
Will somebody please tell me what the big deal about qnx is? if we want people working on something interesting, make rtlinux work, or just help linux have lower latency in general for apps that don't really need rt capability. ----------------------------
I really don't understand what the big deal is about QNX. It's not as interesting as VxWorks, it's not as stable as... well anything. It's buggy as all hell, and it only is guaranteed to meet deadlines if you don't fork. (try it, it's true, it can blow deadlines by up to 40ms under certain circumstances)
It's kind of like unix, but different enough to bite you in the ass a lot, and make it so you have to do porting work on anything normal that you'd want to run.
Photon is a nice windowing system, but it's not worth running qnx for.
It's non-free in the libre sense, and it's ludicrously expensive to use commercially. Actually it's this bizarre 'points' system where grep might be 3 points to release it, and whatever, and they charge per point, some negotiated fee.
Will somebody please tell me what the big deal about qnx is? if we want people working on something interesting, make rtlinux work, or just help linux have lower latency in general for apps that don't really need rt capability. ----------------------------
Slashdot Mirror
chattr +i makes the file immutable, +u makes it so when the file is deleted, the contents are saved.
or if you're in the BSD land, then it's chflags schg to make the file system immutable, sunlnk to make it system undeleteable, or ucgh/uunlink for user immutable/un-deleteable versions of the above.
----------------------------
A rich XML based syntax? Just a pet peeve of mine, but why does everything have to be XML based? It's like Microsoft saying that C++ is the first language to have the ability to have XML-based comments embedded in the code. Yep, it is. But is =head1 really any better or worse than ?
As for your requests for functionality, perhaps you should read Installation and package tools document, version 1.0 by jkh over at the FreeBSD side of the world. While I know I'll be burned at the stake for saying good things about FreeBSD on slashdot, that document has some excellent thoughts which the Linux world could also benefit from.
----------------------------
ask why a new version of a package was released?
see a list of changes between old and new versions?
Well, RPM does include a Changelog which should include why the package was released, and what changes were made. check the --changelog option.
tell the system to apply only security or high-priority fixes?
You can do this mostly by installing a distro, and then tracking a particular version of it. Redhat-6.2 has lots of updates, but all of them fall into your 'security/high-priority' category.
tell the system to automatically process all updates except those involving specified packages, which I want to approve on a case-by-case basis?
It's trivial to setup something like this where you mirror the appropriate dir on updates.redhat.com, then have a script which does an rpm -F foo.rpm on every rpm whose name isn't listed in 'no-auto-upgrade.txt'. However, given your original statement, it's not possible. You're saying that you want it to automatically everything, except it should psychically know what you want to pick and choose from. Ummm... no matter how you cut it, you'll at some point have to tell the system 'upgrade or no'.
tell the system never to upgrade packages that require upgrades of packages used by other software (eg, libraries)?
This is the default behavior of RPM. You have to use --nodeps to override it.
ask for packages that will help me convert GIF files to PNG?
You want natural language capability search built into your package manager? You've watched too much star trek. If however you did a quick search for RPMs that contained both 'GIF' and 'PNG' in their name on a site like rpmfind.net you'd find gif2png is readily available.
ask for only packages targeted at beginners?
I have no idea what use this is. Beginner is a very broad term. Is Enlightenment aimed at beginners? How about Windowmaker? The answer for both is a resounding maybe!, depending on the configuration. How about gcc, is that for beginners? After all, most computer barely-literates don't know how to use a compiler. And bind, that's definitely an advanced package right? unless of course you install a caching-nameserver rpm that helps the beginner have their own caching nameserver, then it's beginner. Or an obvious beginner package like grip, whcih isn't beginner at all, i mean, you have to know about mp3 encoders and cd rippers.
ask for only well-integrated, well-tested packages?
Use RedHat, they'll only give you these. If you stick to basics, unless you use Mandrake, you usually won't get anything that's not well-tested and integrated.
get reviews of a package?
Ah yes, all programs expand until they read mail. Or in your case, you're asking for the package manager to read newsgroups and mailing lists, so it'd be a newsreader too. Maybe we should just integrate this package manager of yours into emacs.
find out how to get started using a package?
The RPM format allows for certain files to be flagged as documentation and generally installs them in the path /usr/doc/$rpm_name. and man files in /usr/man. you can get a list of what it installed by doing rpm -qi package_name.
begin browsing the documentation for a package before approving a full installation?
again, you're asking the package manager to do things that just don't make sense. Why not read up on the software, then install it? Or just install it, and if it's no use to you, do an 'rpm -e'.
have some help in configuration updates?
These are called man pages, and documentation files. You read them and they help you. Or hell, if reading real documentation is too much work for you, then see if there's a HOWTO that you can peruse somewhere on the net.
Personally I use FreeBSD which has it's own unique set of strengths and weaknesses, and if you don't think anybody out there is thinking about this stuff, you should read this document which is a summary of the state of these things in FreeBSD, and some ideas on how to progress.
----------------------------
On a related note, a book I think everybody who doesn't understand statistics should take is the classic book How to lie with Statistics. For the less mathematical person, it's a good way of showing just how easily and subtly one can shift the results of those fail-proof statistics.
----------------------------
I can get you those results in a poll too, I'll just use residents from the place I call home. Haverford, PA, a suburb of Philly where the average home costs $600k and the average household income most definitely isn't $40k.
----------------------------
pine is easy to use, reliable, supports HTML formatting and has no problem with attachments. It's MIME support works wonderfully to launch the appropriate viewers as neccessary for them.
----------------------------
That's absolutely not true. The +50 cap has eliminated incentive for a large population of the /. audiance to make meaningful posts, as there's no benefit, and it also means that if you get a post that gets moderated to 5 then marked down to 4 as overrated, you lose karma.
I'm not sure what the goal of the +50 cap is, but all it really does, short term, is encourage trolling by +2 posters, and long-term it eliminates the possibility of filtering by karma with an nntp-type interface. Some of us might want to never read anything by somebody with over 1k karma, for example. Fortunately most +2 posters don't abuse their privilege.
----------------------------
If you've never wasted time on a technical project solely because you wanted to see if you could do it, then you probably aren't that good of a geek anyway. I think most geeks have done some ludicrously unproductive things solely as mental exercises or even just as jokes. Who cares? If you want them to be productive then start a company and hire them. Until then, no, you're not their manager.
----------------------------
The above poster does make a point though, that while Vint Cerf has done some astoundingly impressive things in his career, his current employment is as "a suit", and his employment has never once been related to privacy or security concerns.
/. number?
I'm not attempting to trivialize his accomplishments in the computing field, but honestly I just don't see why his opinion matters in this case.
And by the way, since when is 12,000 a really low
----------------------------
yeah, but professional athletes have better skillz. you're trying to keep people out just because they've got skillz. who wants the olympics to sux0r? I like the olympics almost as much as i like pepsi... mmmm... pepsi.
----------------------------
you're dumb. obviously they'll just overload the piracy operator and create a new money operator. spuh
----------------------------
karma wh0re.
----------------------------
handles upgrades quite nicely.
pkg_version -l '<' -c > update
produces a handy upgrade script.
----------------------------
FreeBSD's ports/pkg system:
1) works with binaries. you can use pkg_add binary_package to install a binary, and to build a binary package, just 'make package' from the appropriate ports directory.
2) figures out dependencies auto-magically and downloads all the required libraries.
3) doesn't handle upgrades nicely, you have to do a pkg_delete foo ; pkg_add foo combination to upgrade.
lastly, apt stands for 'advanced package tool', something that 'man 8 apt' would've told you.
----------------------------
Fortunately though, most people with the skills to cause such hassles also realize that it's just plain dumb to do such things.
----------------------------
Must your desktop computer be online at all times? Must it have zero down time? If not, please give me your IP address, and a vulnerability which causes you to do a full reset on your computer. I'll write an appropriate exploit.
Here's how to turn it into a true DoS.
while(1){crashPhone();
sleep(120);
}
Now as you were noting about this not being a DoS attack, could you please give me your Nokia phone's SMS e-mail gateway address?
----------------------------
if by ultra-sophisticated humour you mean idiotic remarks that make me wish i could use a killfile while reading /., then yes, i agree.
Burnin' Karma, since we're not allowed to use it anyway.
----------------------------
Then why hasn't the MPAA/DVDCCA authorized any Linux/OSS developers to use CSS?
Actually if you read the DVDCCA FAQ you'll find that Sigma Designs has plans and a license to make a Linux DVD player. Non open-source, but it's something anyway.
God bless america, land of the free.
----------------------------
To show it, here's output from fdisk on /dev/ida/c0d0:
/dev/ida/c0d0p1 * 10 138 526320 83 Linux
/dev/ida/c0d0p2 139 2176 8315040 5 Extended
/dev/ida/c0d0p3 1 9 36704 12 Compaq diagnostics
----------------------------
1 - You seem biased against VxWorks, did you have a bad experience with it?
/.'ers love QNX. It's not gratis (to use for real), it's not libre, and it doesn't offer any significant capabilities that are unique solely to the system. My point was simply that for people who are just toying around and learning about RT-OS's, why not help develop something that fits in with the ideals that /.'ers allegedly hold in high regard.
2 - i've seen qnx4 crash horridly.
3 - nope, it's a real bug. if you pester qnx enough, and give them enough money eventually they'll tell you that they lose the ability to guaranteee it will meet deadlines during forks.
4 - nope, not completely posix. sed is broken, to name the first bug i discovered in it.
5 - yes, but vxworks has a slightly more sane licensing scheme, if only slightly.
6 - yep, debugging and such on vxworks isn't as simple as it is on qnx, but i had to use ice to find the fork latency bug. that's not what I call easy either.
I don't claim that making an RT-OS is easy, but I don't understand why
----------------------------
deadlines and fork. confirmed by qnx. it IS a bug. there are NOT plans to fix it.
----------------------------
You're insinuating that slashdot is full of idiots who only do things for ego, and that quality posts will disappear solely because of limited karma. This notion is patently rediculous.
Slashdot is a community built on a unique spirit, and there's no way that people with large amounts of karma are going to burn their karma with posts that don't say anything useful, just because they can't get more anymore.
----------------------------
I am referring to the QNX4 kernel. Do you have experience with the new version, and most importantly, have they fixed the obnoxious 'i'm forking therefore you may experience unexpected latency of' bug?
I was writing an app where latency over 3ms would crash the hardware (bad hardware, i know) and this one bit me hard, and left a bad bad taste in my mouth.
----------------------------
I really don't understand what the big deal is about QNX. It's not as interesting as VxWorks, it's not as stable as... well anything. It's buggy as all hell, and it only is guaranteed to meet deadlines if you don't fork. (try it, it's true, it can blow deadlines by up to 40ms under certain circumstances)
It's kind of like unix, but different enough to bite you in the ass a lot, and make it so you have to do porting work on anything normal that you'd want to run.
Photon is a nice windowing system, but it's not worth running qnx for.
It's non-free in the libre sense, and it's ludicrously expensive to use commercially. Actually it's this bizarre 'points' system where grep might be 3 points to release it, and whatever, and they charge per point, some negotiated fee.
Will somebody please tell me what the big deal about qnx is? if we want people working on something interesting, make rtlinux work, or just help linux have lower latency in general for apps that don't really need rt capability.
----------------------------
I really don't understand what the big deal is about QNX. It's not as interesting as VxWorks, it's not as stable as... well anything. It's buggy as all hell, and it only is guaranteed to meet deadlines if you don't fork. (try it, it's true, it can blow deadlines by up to 40ms under certain circumstances) It's kind of like unix, but different enough to bite you in the ass a lot, and make it so you have to do porting work on anything normal that you'd want to run. Photon is a nice windowing system, but it's not worth running qnx for. It's non-free in the libre sense, and it's ludicrously expensive to use commercially. Actually it's this bizarre 'points' system where grep might be 3 points to release it, and whatever, and they charge per point, some negotiated fee. Will somebody please tell me what the big deal about qnx is? if we want people working on something interesting, make rtlinux work, or just help linux have lower latency in general for apps that don't really need rt capability.
----------------------------