Gnome 2.4 is in unstable. You can have that Debian distro this evening! Install a minimal Debian stable again, then change your apt repository to the unstable one, and then do the usual steps to upgrade packages. It works excellently. I've been using Gnome 2.4 in Debian unstable for some time now.
By the way, I run unstable on all of my machines, and it's really quite stable despite its name.
We're not talking about release intervals any larger than those of existing Enterprise Linux systems. I think Red Hat aims for 18 months. I'd like to help Debian get to doing releases at about 12-month intervals.
Try synaptic. There is also synaptic-debtags in unstable.
I am an old timer and am still using dselect. Dselect provides a command to remove oboslete packages. Position the cursor on the "Obsolete / Local Packages" title and press "-" . Everything under that title gets marked for removal. I'm sure someone else can tell us how to do this with other front-ends.
I think synaptic might do the tree view you want.
I think that libraries chould be marked so that they would be removed when nothing depended upon them. This would be a flag in the package header, rather than an install state. The problem with doing it as an install state is that you have no way of knowing whether the user likes the program or not, whether or not he asked for it to be installed. If it's a library, you are reasonably sure that he has no way to use it and it's safe to remove. But not all users would want this feature turned on - I think it would work much better for plain users than for developers.
Instead of finding gaim on your giant overwhelming repository, you go to gaim.sourceforge.net and download gaim.rpm, double click it, and it installs.
A good example would not use SourceForge, which is a giant and overwhelming repository. But I understand that your example would work with your personal web site as well.
There are really only two choices when resolving dependencies. Either package all dependencies along with the desired software, a la Windows and (I'm told) Mac, or have some sort of repository of the current package pool, whether it's a DVD or an FTP site, from which you can pull required software to resolve a dependency.
I don't really like the all-in-one-file method, becuase it makes it nearly impossible for library makers to fix their libraries. Unless, of course, the one-big-files are all coming from one central place that does active release management on them, replacing packages whenever libraries change, in which case you are back to one big repository. It also makes it more difficult for shared libraries to help you conserve memory if there are lots of different point releases of the library being used by different applications, rather than one periodicaly-updated copy of the library.
Monolithic repositories can't contain all useful software, but it is easy with apt to load from multiple repositories, where one may be specific to an application and the other is the main repository and resolves all of the dependencies of that application.
I think this is one of the things we got right with apt.
Why not both? It's possible for the service provider to override the more general project choices, especially since nobody is proposing to remove packages from Debian.
Well, if I'm not mis-informed, Portage compiles the software on your system. This is not something I'd impose upon Gramdma.
Click-and-install is certainly possible with Apt. If you are connected to the package repository, you should get all of the software you need to resolve any dependency with "apt update; apt-get install package-name". There have been click-and-install implenentations using this. Providing a meaningful package catalog might be more of a problem.
A note about the Toy Story names used for Debian versions. They are working titles within Debian, rather than the names of real products. The released products have version numbers rather than names of Toy Story characters.
Toy Story character names are trademarked by Pixar and Disney. Disney is especially known for its legal department. We can't really make commercial use of those trademarks.
Something more along the lines of CollaborativeLinux would be more representative of the thrust of the project
Too many sylables. I don't think we have been very successful in getting entire concepts into two words. Open Source and Free Software are examples. There is lots of confusion about both.
But isn't it a poor situation where a developer has to worry about things that are as insignificant as petty licence politics, before they decide what environment to develop their application in?
Richard Stallman thinks so, which is why he opposes proprietary software. No proprietary software, no problem. This is where Richard and I differ somewhat. I think that proprietary software and Free Software should exist together on a level playing field. And personally I am much more interested in working on Free Software.
The Troll Tech folks chose (with a great deal of prodding) to use a GPL + commercial dual-licensing model. They do this so that they can support their families while making good Free software. This is something that we can respect. They don't have to facilitate proprietary software while making the free stuff. They can choose to make money off of proprietary developers.
The only question in my mind is whether we need to make the same choice. Somehow, GNOME (or should I say GTK) got made without dual-licensing.
You may be trying to say something in favor of BSD-like licensing. In that case, I think you should consider that this argument has two sides, and that it is too often seenn only from the standpoint of the person who recieves free software, rather than the person who creates it.
It would help if you could tell me specificaly what you think is wrong with the apt + front-end combination as far as user friendliness is concerned. Try answering these: 1. What don't you like about all existing front-ends. This is not to say that any of them would work for grandma, but it helps to understand why. 2. Why do you feel that the front-end + back-end arrangement is fundamentaly flawed?
It's not only desktop. It must be desktop and server.
I think it should support the media formats that we can legally support in Open Source. The service companies may want to have their own, properly licensed, add-ons for formats that we can't support. I think we have the opportunity to push Ogg as a standard in the Userlinux venue.
Well, the fact that I am ex Debian Project Leader, a member of the SPI board (Debian's corporation) and Debian's representative to some standards groups means that the bridge already exists, doesn't it? My task is to extend that bridge to the business people who participate in this.
One nice thing about GNOME is that a commercial license is not necessary to write and distribute a proprietary GNOME application. That makes the customers life easier.
Well, I don't agree with your criticism of Debian.
First, installation is being adressed. The currently-released installer is a rewrite of one I made in 1996 or so. It was great for 1996. I wrote Busybox for that installer, by the way. The new installer being tested for the next release has positive reviews. There is also a port of Red Hat's installer.
But the most important thing about installers is that they are run once. People base entire distribution reviews on the installer, which is just stupid.
Debian has Perl 5.6 in unstable at the moment. I don't know if 5.8 is very different, and what the Perl maintainer has to say about it. Why not ask him?
Unstable gets security updates to the main branch, rather than to security.debian.org . Security.debian.org exists because of the need to bypass the release management for stable to get fixes in immediately.
Regarding the security record of various distributions, I don't think the commercial ones will tell us if they are hit, unless it becomes obvious from outside. Who knows how often they have been compromised? Gentoo just announced a compromise, perhaps based on the same brk() bug.
The really impressive thing about the Debian breach was that it happened at 5 PM, they had detected and confirmed a breach and had the sites shut down by 10 PM, they announced the breach at 10 AM, and they did the forensics and found an unsuspected exploit within about a week. I dare you to show me a commercial Linux distribution that has been that timely.
Please read the paper. That will explain something of what I am trying to do. The main thrust is not a radical improvement in user-friendliness. The "User" in the name is due to the user-supported nature of the economic paradigm I am proposing.
Remember that the Java Desktop is really GNOME. Java is a brand-name for the desktop, and they package their VM with it so that they can say it has something to do with the Java language. But the desktop doesn't run via Java.
I am also more than a little dubious about the announced Sun-China deal and how it will really play out.
Our goal is to get everything we do into Debian. Sometimes, Debian might not want it, or the package maintainer may be slow to accept it. So, I think we will end up having our own repository for fixes. But if we are unable to get Debian to take stuff, it is more expensive for us to maintain - we have incentive to work with Debian.
The problem is that the third party you point to is not obligated to keep the sources up for three years. You are. So you must have a contract with them or something before you point to them.
You missed my point. It is that there are two sides to the equation. You are only considering the person who takes free software, not the person who makes free software.
there is nothing to prevent the consolidated widget company from taking that software, improving it and keeping the improvements proprietary.
Only if the consolidated widget company never distributed the product. If they distribute it, they have to comply with the terms of the GPL regarding derived works.
I do know of a number of companies that use the GPL to drive commercial license sales. Troll Tech, Sleepycat, MySQL come to mind. There are no doubt others.
Certainly some commercial licenses do not have the exact same terms as the GPL. But my point is that other software licenses trade the right to use, redistribute, and modify just as the GPL does. But they trade it most often for money. Other considerations than financial ones are not unheard of commercial licenses.
This particular term of the license, 3(b), activates when you distribute a binary copy to someone without the source. Once you do that, you don't get to pick and choose who you will fulfill that obligation for. The license says any third party.
The fact that it's any third party makes it a lot easier to enforce the license, because any third party can verify your compliance with 3(b).
Note that even if right of first sale applies (which is questionable) it does not mean "no strings". The GPL terms, for example, would still apply, and would say what must be included in the sale.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, I run unstable on all of my machines, and it's really quite stable despite its name.
We're not talking about release intervals any larger than those of existing Enterprise Linux systems. I think Red Hat aims for 18 months. I'd like to help Debian get to doing releases at about 12-month intervals.
Thanks
Bruce
I am an old timer and am still using dselect. Dselect provides a command to remove oboslete packages. Position the cursor on the "Obsolete / Local Packages" title and press "-" . Everything under that title gets marked for removal. I'm sure someone else can tell us how to do this with other front-ends.
I think synaptic might do the tree view you want.
I think that libraries chould be marked so that they would be removed when nothing depended upon them. This would be a flag in the package header, rather than an install state. The problem with doing it as an install state is that you have no way of knowing whether the user likes the program or not, whether or not he asked for it to be installed. If it's a library, you are reasonably sure that he has no way to use it and it's safe to remove. But not all users would want this feature turned on - I think it would work much better for plain users than for developers.
Thanks
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
A good example would not use SourceForge, which is a giant and overwhelming repository. But I understand that your example would work with your personal web site as well.
There are really only two choices when resolving dependencies. Either package all dependencies along with the desired software, a la Windows and (I'm told) Mac, or have some sort of repository of the current package pool, whether it's a DVD or an FTP site, from which you can pull required software to resolve a dependency.
I don't really like the all-in-one-file method, becuase it makes it nearly impossible for library makers to fix their libraries. Unless, of course, the one-big-files are all coming from one central place that does active release management on them, replacing packages whenever libraries change, in which case you are back to one big repository. It also makes it more difficult for shared libraries to help you conserve memory if there are lots of different point releases of the library being used by different applications, rather than one periodicaly-updated copy of the library.
Monolithic repositories can't contain all useful software, but it is easy with apt to load from multiple repositories, where one may be specific to an application and the other is the main repository and resolves all of the dependencies of that application.
I think this is one of the things we got right with apt.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Click-and-install is certainly possible with Apt. If you are connected to the package repository, you should get all of the software you need to resolve any dependency with "apt update; apt-get install package-name". There have been click-and-install implenentations using this. Providing a meaningful package catalog might be more of a problem.
Bruce
Toy Story character names are trademarked by Pixar and Disney. Disney is especially known for its legal department. We can't really make commercial use of those trademarks.
Bruce
Too many sylables. I don't think we have been very successful in getting entire concepts into two words. Open Source and Free Software are examples. There is lots of confusion about both.
Bruce
Richard Stallman thinks so, which is why he opposes proprietary software. No proprietary software, no problem. This is where Richard and I differ somewhat. I think that proprietary software and Free Software should exist together on a level playing field. And personally I am much more interested in working on Free Software.
The Troll Tech folks chose (with a great deal of prodding) to use a GPL + commercial dual-licensing model. They do this so that they can support their families while making good Free software. This is something that we can respect. They don't have to facilitate proprietary software while making the free stuff. They can choose to make money off of proprietary developers.
The only question in my mind is whether we need to make the same choice. Somehow, GNOME (or should I say GTK) got made without dual-licensing.
You may be trying to say something in favor of BSD-like licensing. In that case, I think you should consider that this argument has two sides, and that it is too often seenn only from the standpoint of the person who recieves free software, rather than the person who creates it.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
I think it should support the media formats that we can legally support in Open Source. The service companies may want to have their own, properly licensed, add-ons for formats that we can't support. I think we have the opportunity to push Ogg as a standard in the Userlinux venue.
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
First, installation is being adressed. The currently-released installer is a rewrite of one I made in 1996 or so. It was great for 1996. I wrote Busybox for that installer, by the way. The new installer being tested for the next release has positive reviews. There is also a port of Red Hat's installer.
But the most important thing about installers is that they are run once. People base entire distribution reviews on the installer, which is just stupid.
Debian has Perl 5.6 in unstable at the moment. I don't know if 5.8 is very different, and what the Perl maintainer has to say about it. Why not ask him?
Unstable gets security updates to the main branch, rather than to security.debian.org . Security.debian.org exists because of the need to bypass the release management for stable to get fixes in immediately.
Regarding the security record of various distributions, I don't think the commercial ones will tell us if they are hit, unless it becomes obvious from outside. Who knows how often they have been compromised? Gentoo just announced a compromise, perhaps based on the same brk() bug.
The really impressive thing about the Debian breach was that it happened at 5 PM, they had detected and confirmed a breach and had the sites shut down by 10 PM, they announced the breach at 10 AM, and they did the forensics and found an unsuspected exploit within about a week. I dare you to show me a commercial Linux distribution that has been that timely.
Bruce
Bruce
I am also more than a little dubious about the announced Sun-China deal and how it will really play out.
Bruce
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Bruce
Only if the consolidated widget company never distributed the product. If they distribute it, they have to comply with the terms of the GPL regarding derived works.
I do know of a number of companies that use the GPL to drive commercial license sales. Troll Tech, Sleepycat, MySQL come to mind. There are no doubt others.
Bruce
Certainly some commercial licenses do not have the exact same terms as the GPL. But my point is that other software licenses trade the right to use, redistribute, and modify just as the GPL does. But they trade it most often for money. Other considerations than financial ones are not unheard of commercial licenses.
Bruce
The fact that it's any third party makes it a lot easier to enforce the license, because any third party can verify your compliance with 3(b).
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce