Hmmmm... so Microsoft doctors something which they claim to be legitimate evidence, and then gets caught when the details are looked into. Reminds me of a video tape during the antitrust trial.
Sorry, but anyone who says that this is just an honest mistake by Microsoft is deluding themselves. The mistake that Microsoft is a really sorry about is getting caught.
I am a Debian user and I *love* my apt-get. BUT, it only works seemlessly if you stay strictly with official debian sources in your/etc/apt/sources.list file. If you don't, you run the possibility of having package name collisions.
Let me give you an example. I have added Ximian Gnome's sources to my/etc/apt/sources.list file. Both Debian and Ximian have a package called "sawfish-gnome", and both use different versioning schemes. Ximian's sawfish-gnome depends on sawfish. Where as Debian's sawfish-gnome conflicts with sawfish.
SOOOO, whenever Debian updates to a higher version than Ximian, apt will tell me that it needs to de-install sawfish, which will in turn de-install a number of my Ximian packages that depend on sawfish. Of course, I don't really want that.
Currently, the only way to solve this is to tell apt to "hold" the Ximian versions of sawfish and sawfish-gnome. This is somewhat annoying and a direct result of name space collision. A better solution, IMNSHO, is to have some sort of global package naming policies. So that in the above problem Ximian would name their deb's "sawfish-ximian" and "sawfish-gnome-ximian" (for example) and each package would provide "sawfish" or "sawfish-gnome". Then when the dependancies were trying to be met, I could choose which set of packages I wanted to meet those dependancies.
All of that being said, I'll still take apt/dpkg over rpmfind/rpm anyday.
Good job. We have now taken the position to the outside world of being total assholes.
I agree with you on this point. But on the overall argument I disagree. Yes, Tatu is trying to be nice. And yes, Theo is being an asshole. But that being said, I don't see how Theo's going to lose this. With his current attitude, he's in danger of losing the PR battle, but that seems to be it.
Have you seen the license for ssh 1.2.12 (which is what OpenSSH is based off of)? Here is the most salient part (IMHO):
This file is part of the ssh software, Copyright (c) 1995 Tatu Ylonen, Finland
COPYING POLICY AND OTHER LEGAL ISSUES
As far as I am concerned, the code I have written for this software can be used freely for any purpose. Any derived versions of this software must be clearly marked as such, and if the derived work is incompatible with the protocol description in the RFC file, it must be called by a name other than "ssh" or "Secure Shell".
The only thing he says about the name is that if you're not compatible, then you can't use the name. Which leaves the only possible interpretation to be that if you are compatible, you can use the name.
I think that it would be a nice gesture on OpenSSH's part to give up the name. But I don't think it is, by any means, required. And if OpenSSH wishes to protect their identity, using a publically available name, that's entirely up to them. Theo could be more nice about it, but I don't think he'd be in the wrong to keep the name.
The problem that I see with this is that it's too easy to intercept in an automated fashion. It doesn't take any secret or anything to be able to determine whether or not the data is there. You simply decode it and you get the hidden message. In fact, if you give it something that isn't an encoded message, it will tell you that it can't decode it. This makes it trivially easy for the carnivore's (et al) to automatically detect this type of obfuscation. They simply have to add a step to their spam filtering code to try deobfuscating before deleting.
The real value would be if this thing would take any garbage and translate it into something - of about equivalant length garbage. Thus it could be coupled with an encryption format that looked like garbage, to effectively obfuscate your communication.
PGP/GPG does not do a good job as the encryption format. It's got these nice, easy to read, headers that show you that it's a GPG encrypted message. What you need is something that will take in what looks for all the world like garbage and spit out the clear text if you got the right key.
Maybe it's just me, maybe not. But if some organization wants to start a fork of Linux that is going to better meet business needs for the OS, go ahead. There is nothing other than your own ability to organize it that is stopping you.
But, I suspect the reason that no one has taken the time and effort to do so is because there is no agreement from Linus to step down, and without that, no one will use the forked version. I know I probably wouldn't. Heck, we even have the -ac series, and still almost everyone uses the straight stuff.
IMHO, this guy is nuts if he's asking Linus to step down. He's looking at the Linux kernel as if it were run by a corporation who cares about a dollar driven bottom line. He's not looking at it like I suspect Linus looks at it: as a piece of art. In other words, it's something that Linus does as an expression of himself. If other people get something good out of it, then that's great. If not, then who cares. Asking Linus to step down is like telling Mozart that his opera had too many notes. Can't he just cut a few? Or like saying that Mozarts operas could be great if only Mozart weren't the one writing them. Can't we get a non-profit organization involved so that the acts will have the nice punch at the end to tell the audience the show's over?
and by this same reasoning, DirecTV has every right to send signals that will disable Hughes chips. If you don't want to receive these signals, you shouldn't be listening for them in the first place. It isn't DirecTV's fault if your self-hacked hardware doesn't react properly to their signal.
The airwaves are public, after all.
Playing devil's advocate, why is this argument any different than, "That guy in the park who shot you, had every right to shoot you. If you didn't want to get shot, you shouldn't have been standing where you were. It was a public park, after all."
I'm not convinced by your argument that Hughes has the right to destroy your property. Either they are responsible for what happens to the stuff that goes into your yard or they aren't. They can't have it both ways.
Once Hughes broadcasts their signal into your yard, they release control over it. Which means that they can't control what you do with it, which in turn, releases them from responsibility for what you do with it. If Hughes still retains control of the stuff the send into your yard, what would happen if they sent a book on how to build bombs into your yard? If you took that and then built a bomb and used it to kill someone, would Hughes then be responsible for the deaths?
If on the other hand Hughes is saying that they retain the control over the data that they, against your will, thrust into your yard. Then don't they also have to retain responsibility for what you do with it?
It seems to me that they want the responsibilty if what you do with it is crack their code. But they don't want the responsibility if they send you some data which you could argue led directly to some criminal act.
Does this mean that corel is going to continue to support their apps under Linux? I hope so. But this strikes me as the first step towards dropping linux support altogether. And that scares me.
No good can come when M$ invests money into a company backing Linux.
Say "this library is GPL-proprietary software, only members of FSF political circle may use it", and be good. But calling "free software" something that anybody who slightly disagrees with FSF cannot even touch - that's a gross exaggeration if I ever have seen one.
The reason that you wouldn't say that is that it's not true. Anyone can use GPL software. The GPL only restricts what gets done with the source code. Specifically, it puts restrictions on source code so that GPL'd code won't make its way into proprietary software.
And that doesn't seem unreasonable to me. When I work on code, and contribute it to the community, I don't want someone else making money off of my effort. Sorry that's just the way I am.
You may decide that since this is a restriction, that it's not free, since "free" would imply without restriction. But "free as in speech" doesn't imply without restriction (e.g. slander, libel, and yelling "fire" in crowded public places), so I don't see the need for "free software" to imply no restrictions.
If this is true, then that's a lot of cheap computers, that are going to need an operating system. One that's already demonstrated an ability to be easily ported to lots of architectures. This could be a big win for Linux.
1) The drives are non SCSI, so in sun land, you can't mirror the hard drives [1]
...
[1] Note: if there is a way around this, I would LOVE to hear it, but every where I've seen, unless you have 2 different IDE busses, you can't mirror root drives
I don't mean to start a flame war, but several distributions of linux run on sparc, including my favorite, debian. Linux includes software raid that works quite happily over IDE. In fact, I've installed debian on a sparc and used software raid. It worked great. (The only reason that I did it is that I had to put together a demonstration very quickly, and apt is a ton easier than downloading and compiling everything by hand.)
That being said, running any sort of raid on a single IDE bus is a really bad idea, you will absolutely kill your performance because of the limitations of the bus. But it will work.
I like reiser, and I'm glad for my nice quick reboots, but I don't understand how they claim so much better performance. I did a test using bonnie. I first ran the test on/home using ext2, then unmounted/home, did a mkreiserfs on it, remounted, and redid the test. Here's the results
On ext2, I see slightly faster (~10%) on per character io, and significantly faster (30-50%) on block io.
This is on the same partition on the same disk. The reiser page, of course, says how much faster it is than ext2, but I can't verify that. Has anyone else seen anything similar? I recently read a review of reiser that came up with the same results... although I can't find that review now.
The comparison is quite detailed, considering the fact that it appears in a magazine that can be bought on the newsstand.
The most interesting part that I find about this entire article is the fact that this magazine (which I subcribe to) is a free subscription. The magazine doesn't make any money off of subscriptions. The magazine effectively makes all of its money from advertisements. The fact that they would review a opensource competitor is surprising in itself. The fact that they gave it the nod, is going to do nothing but hurt their advertising deals with the commercial products that they reviewed.
Of course, that's only one way to look at it. The other way to look at is that they just effectively said that if you want to get all your vulnerabilities detected, you need to buy at least one thing. Combine that one thing with the open source product, and you've got a complete solution.
If the coach of the other race was more qualified then he would have been hired. It's as simple as that.
There's no way you can know if this is true or not. And what gives credance to the idea that it's false is that of all the black people in america, just 1 (Tony Dungy) is talented enough to coach an NFL team? That seems incredibly far fetched to me.
Now, of course, it doesn't prove a thing. But it certainly makes me wonder.
Everywhere I've worked (UNIX Systems Admin/Engineering) I've been seen as a remarkably compentent, skilled worker....until I meet the customer face-to-face. Then, suddenly, my decisions are questioned more, people go over my head to ask about things that are my responsibility. Even back to college (University of Michigan), I was faced every day with fellow students who were SO SURE that they were smarter than me
This is true for me too. I'm white. Why do you assume that since all of this happens, that it's racially motivated? This stuff just happens, and it seems to me that office politics is the single most non-discriminatory thing there is.
Find a black man on your job site, and ask him where he's from, and what high school he attended. I guarantee he's either got parents as priviliged as most of yours, or he worked his ASS off to get to where he is now.
Again, why do you assume that this is true only for black men on the jobsite? You seem to assume that black people only get on the job through hard work and that everyone else was handed it on a silver platter.
Ok. So your high school didn't challenge you. Which left you with lots of time to do things, like challenge yourself. And it would appear from your own words, that you got something very rewarding from being challenged. My high school challenged me incredibly, but it left me almost no time to do anything else. It would seem to me that we did about the same amount of work. Why assume that you're the only one that worked your A$$ off?
Consultants (like me) who tote their laptop around with them and advertise that they use Linux instead of Winders. Consultants who are going into companies trying to save those companies money by deploying linux where appropriate. This small bit of eye candy creates a huge amount of confidence for the client.
(Yes it's irrational. Welcome to consulting.)
The point is that making Linux attractive to my client gives me the oppurtunity to better meet their needs. When I do that, I get more work, and recommendataions.
Yeah, but it's a bit nippy. International Falls, MN borders Canada. It's also the coldest spot in the continental US, but it's a southern point in Canada!
It's a commonly held fallacy, especially in the South (where I live) that the southern accent implies lesser intelligence. While I don't believe that about accents tell you anything about the person, I like the implication that calling it winders means it's dumber... which it is.
I am entirely for enforcement of the GPL. And I think that what this company did (if true) is reprehensible.
But what about the possibility that another course be taken which simply puts market pressure against the company instead of legal pressure? What I'm thinking is that the reason that this company had an oppurtunity is that the market was ready for everybuddy to run under winders but no one was doing it.
I've seen ports of a few GTK+ based programs, most notably nessus. Someone has ported GTK+ to winders, and that with cygwin apparently made the winders port of nessus quite easy. I would think it would also make a winders port of everybuddy equally easy because all of the basic stuff is there.
If that happened, then everybuddy running natively on winders would always be one step ahead of this theiving company's product. All the enhancements of an entire league of open source programs would be able to make everybuddy better and contain more features, and this company's product would always be trying to catch up with those features. Wouldn't it be better punishment to let the market ignore all their efforts? Or at the very least to make it so that whatever work they did is better spent by giving the work back to the open source project?
I don't have a clue about how easy it would be to port everybuddy to winders. But, doesn't this event necessitate it's being done? And if so, then would that fix the problem? And if so, is this a general course of action that could be taken to alleviate problems with GPL enforcement?
(Please remember before flaming and moderating me into oblivion that these are questions. If I knew the answers, I wouldn't have asked.)
The most interesting thing that I see in these pictures is that they mention the frame rate. The pics that I see have 8 FPS, 19 FPS, and 12 FPS respectively.
That's effectively unplayable.
Re:The problem is in the dependency database
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An RPM Port Of APT
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My interest is not in the space vs. speed tradeoff. I'm not particularly trying to save database space. Instead, I'm trying to save hassle and time administering the system.
But that's exactly my point. The database is the thing that saves you time because it knows where everything is on the system and keeps that information in an easily searchable format. I can't see how a packaging system w/out a database would be less hassle and save time. Everytime you had to install a package, you'd couldn't search the database to find the relevant information that you needed. You'd have to search the filesystem.
Or maybe I'm just missing what you mean. can you elaborate?
Re:Does this potentially kill Debian?
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Debian works because volunteers make it work (and a very small but growing number of paid developers).
Right, but Debian (and Linux in general) depends almost entirely upon the donated time of its volunteers. The more volunteers, the larger the pool of donated time. Apt draws volunteers to Debian because it makes Debian better than most of the other distros. But if the value of Debian is replicated somewhere else, w/out all of the inconveniences of Debian, then your volunteer force diminishes. (Example inconvenience: almost no support from vendors who will only certify their products with RedHat.)
I'm sure the answer to this is that Debian will continue to exist if only one developer is working on it. But one developer can't do the entire thing, can't keep up with every package upgrade, bug list, new package, etc. There is a critical mass that is required to keep the distribution going. (There is a critical mass that is required to keep Linux going.) Does apt-rpm have the potential to lower the volunteer force below the critical mass? Clearly you think not, and you've given one example of why apt is not the only thing that makes debian great. Any more?
Re:The problem is in the dependency database
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An RPM Port Of APT
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What we need is a packaging system that can correctly detect whether or not dependent packages are installed without having to have a database. Inevitably, the database will get out of sync the moment you have to compile something from source because no.deb or.rpm file is available right then, or because you have a local patch to fix a bug you need which isn't important enough for enough other people for the author(s) to fix right now (or maybe is to complicated for them to figure out how to roll it back in without breaking things for other people that you don't happen to need to worry about).
The solution to this, of course, is that you learn how to use the packaging system. So instead of just installing the thing that you want to install, you build a package for it and install the package. In the worst case scenario, you could build an empty package that only meets the dependancies that you are trying to meet.
I see the database as a tradeoff in the space vs speed deal. You can save space by not having a database, but determining if dependancies are met w/out a database will slow down your package management.
Re:Does this potentially kill Debian?
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I said:
I find myself torn between the unbelievable convenience that apt gives me, and the inconvenience because Debian is not being RedHat, and so much of Linux has a RedHat focus.
My apologies. I meant to say that I find myself torn between the convenience of apt and the inconvenience because Debian is not RedHat, and so much of the Linux world (i.e. corporate sponsorship, product support, etc) has a RedHat focus.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm... so Microsoft doctors something which they claim to be legitimate evidence, and then gets caught when the details are looked into. Reminds me of a video tape during the antitrust trial.
Sorry, but anyone who says that this is just an honest mistake by Microsoft is deluding themselves. The mistake that Microsoft is a really sorry about is getting caught.
I am a Debian user and I *love* my apt-get. BUT, it only works seemlessly if you stay strictly with official debian sources in your /etc/apt/sources.list file. If you don't, you run the possibility of having package name collisions.
/etc/apt/sources.list file. Both Debian and Ximian have a package called "sawfish-gnome", and both use different versioning schemes. Ximian's sawfish-gnome depends on sawfish. Where as Debian's sawfish-gnome conflicts with sawfish.
Let me give you an example. I have added Ximian Gnome's sources to my
SOOOO, whenever Debian updates to a higher version than Ximian, apt will tell me that it needs to de-install sawfish, which will in turn de-install a number of my Ximian packages that depend on sawfish. Of course, I don't really want that.
Currently, the only way to solve this is to tell apt to "hold" the Ximian versions of sawfish and sawfish-gnome. This is somewhat annoying and a direct result of name space collision. A better solution, IMNSHO, is to have some sort of global package naming policies. So that in the above problem Ximian would name their deb's "sawfish-ximian" and "sawfish-gnome-ximian" (for example) and each package would provide "sawfish" or "sawfish-gnome". Then when the dependancies were trying to be met, I could choose which set of packages I wanted to meet those dependancies.
All of that being said, I'll still take apt/dpkg over rpmfind/rpm anyday.
Not to mention, cobol, fortran, Windows/DOS, the x86 line of CPUs, and countless other things that have been done simply for backward compatibility.
People are lazy. That's why old standards never die.
I agree with you on this point. But on the overall argument I disagree. Yes, Tatu is trying to be nice. And yes, Theo is being an asshole. But that being said, I don't see how Theo's going to lose this. With his current attitude, he's in danger of losing the PR battle, but that seems to be it.
Have you seen the license for ssh 1.2.12 (which is what OpenSSH is based off of)? Here is the most salient part (IMHO):
The only thing he says about the name is that if you're not compatible, then you can't use the name. Which leaves the only possible interpretation to be that if you are compatible, you can use the name.
I think that it would be a nice gesture on OpenSSH's part to give up the name. But I don't think it is, by any means, required. And if OpenSSH wishes to protect their identity, using a publically available name, that's entirely up to them. Theo could be more nice about it, but I don't think he'd be in the wrong to keep the name.
The problem that I see with this is that it's too easy to intercept in an automated fashion. It doesn't take any secret or anything to be able to determine whether or not the data is there. You simply decode it and you get the hidden message. In fact, if you give it something that isn't an encoded message, it will tell you that it can't decode it. This makes it trivially easy for the carnivore's (et al) to automatically detect this type of obfuscation. They simply have to add a step to their spam filtering code to try deobfuscating before deleting.
The real value would be if this thing would take any garbage and translate it into something - of about equivalant length garbage. Thus it could be coupled with an encryption format that looked like garbage, to effectively obfuscate your communication.
PGP/GPG does not do a good job as the encryption format. It's got these nice, easy to read, headers that show you that it's a GPG encrypted message. What you need is something that will take in what looks for all the world like garbage and spit out the clear text if you got the right key.
This is a great first step, tho.
But, I suspect the reason that no one has taken the time and effort to do so is because there is no agreement from Linus to step down, and without that, no one will use the forked version. I know I probably wouldn't. Heck, we even have the -ac series, and still almost everyone uses the straight stuff.
IMHO, this guy is nuts if he's asking Linus to step down. He's looking at the Linux kernel as if it were run by a corporation who cares about a dollar driven bottom line. He's not looking at it like I suspect Linus looks at it: as a piece of art. In other words, it's something that Linus does as an expression of himself. If other people get something good out of it, then that's great. If not, then who cares. Asking Linus to step down is like telling Mozart that his opera had too many notes. Can't he just cut a few? Or like saying that Mozarts operas could be great if only Mozart weren't the one writing them. Can't we get a non-profit organization involved so that the acts will have the nice punch at the end to tell the audience the show's over?
Playing devil's advocate, why is this argument any different than, "That guy in the park who shot you, had every right to shoot you. If you didn't want to get shot, you shouldn't have been standing where you were. It was a public park, after all."
I'm not convinced by your argument that Hughes has the right to destroy your property. Either they are responsible for what happens to the stuff that goes into your yard or they aren't. They can't have it both ways.
Once Hughes broadcasts their signal into your yard, they release control over it. Which means that they can't control what you do with it, which in turn, releases them from responsibility for what you do with it. If Hughes still retains control of the stuff the send into your yard, what would happen if they sent a book on how to build bombs into your yard? If you took that and then built a bomb and used it to kill someone, would Hughes then be responsible for the deaths?
If on the other hand Hughes is saying that they retain the control over the data that they, against your will, thrust into your yard. Then don't they also have to retain responsibility for what you do with it?
It seems to me that they want the responsibilty if what you do with it is crack their code. But they don't want the responsibility if they send you some data which you could argue led directly to some criminal act.
How do they get to have it both ways?
Does this mean that corel is going to continue to support their apps under Linux? I hope so. But this strikes me as the first step towards dropping linux support altogether. And that scares me.
No good can come when M$ invests money into a company backing Linux.
The reason that you wouldn't say that is that it's not true. Anyone can use GPL software. The GPL only restricts what gets done with the source code. Specifically, it puts restrictions on source code so that GPL'd code won't make its way into proprietary software.
And that doesn't seem unreasonable to me. When I work on code, and contribute it to the community, I don't want someone else making money off of my effort. Sorry that's just the way I am.
You may decide that since this is a restriction, that it's not free, since "free" would imply without restriction. But "free as in speech" doesn't imply without restriction (e.g. slander, libel, and yelling "fire" in crowded public places), so I don't see the need for "free software" to imply no restrictions.
If this is true, then that's a lot of cheap computers, that are going to need an operating system. One that's already demonstrated an ability to be easily ported to lots of architectures. This could be a big win for Linux.
I don't mean to start a flame war, but several distributions of linux run on sparc, including my favorite, debian. Linux includes software raid that works quite happily over IDE. In fact, I've installed debian on a sparc and used software raid. It worked great. (The only reason that I did it is that I had to put together a demonstration very quickly, and apt is a ton easier than downloading and compiling everything by hand.)
That being said, running any sort of raid on a single IDE bus is a really bad idea, you will absolutely kill your performance because of the limitations of the bus. But it will work.
On ext2, I see slightly faster (~10%) on per character io, and significantly faster (30-50%) on block io.
This is on the same partition on the same disk. The reiser page, of course, says how much faster it is than ext2, but I can't verify that. Has anyone else seen anything similar? I recently read a review of reiser that came up with the same results... although I can't find that review now.
The most interesting part that I find about this entire article is the fact that this magazine (which I subcribe to) is a free subscription. The magazine doesn't make any money off of subscriptions. The magazine effectively makes all of its money from advertisements. The fact that they would review a opensource competitor is surprising in itself. The fact that they gave it the nod, is going to do nothing but hurt their advertising deals with the commercial products that they reviewed.
Of course, that's only one way to look at it. The other way to look at is that they just effectively said that if you want to get all your vulnerabilities detected, you need to buy at least one thing. Combine that one thing with the open source product, and you've got a complete solution.
Is the glass half empty, or half full? Hmmm...
There's no way you can know if this is true or not. And what gives credance to the idea that it's false is that of all the black people in america, just 1 (Tony Dungy) is talented enough to coach an NFL team? That seems incredibly far fetched to me.
Now, of course, it doesn't prove a thing. But it certainly makes me wonder.
This is true for me too. I'm white. Why do you assume that since all of this happens, that it's racially motivated? This stuff just happens, and it seems to me that office politics is the single most non-discriminatory thing there is.
Again, why do you assume that this is true only for black men on the jobsite? You seem to assume that black people only get on the job through hard work and that everyone else was handed it on a silver platter.
Ok. So your high school didn't challenge you. Which left you with lots of time to do things, like challenge yourself. And it would appear from your own words, that you got something very rewarding from being challenged. My high school challenged me incredibly, but it left me almost no time to do anything else. It would seem to me that we did about the same amount of work. Why assume that you're the only one that worked your A$$ off?
Consultants (like me) who tote their laptop around with them and advertise that they use Linux instead of Winders. Consultants who are going into companies trying to save those companies money by deploying linux where appropriate. This small bit of eye candy creates a huge amount of confidence for the client.
(Yes it's irrational. Welcome to consulting.)
The point is that making Linux attractive to my client gives me the oppurtunity to better meet their needs. When I do that, I get more work, and recommendataions.
Pretty is a good thing.
Ok, I forgot to put the smiley in place. Sorry! I was not trying to start a flame war. If you love canada, great.
Yeah, but it's a bit nippy. International Falls, MN borders Canada. It's also the coldest spot in the continental US, but it's a southern point in Canada!
WAHHH!!!!
It's a commonly held fallacy, especially in the South (where I live) that the southern accent implies lesser intelligence. While I don't believe that about accents tell you anything about the person, I like the implication that calling it winders means it's dumber... which it is.
I am entirely for enforcement of the GPL. And I think that what this company did (if true) is reprehensible.
But what about the possibility that another course be taken which simply puts market pressure against the company instead of legal pressure? What I'm thinking is that the reason that this company had an oppurtunity is that the market was ready for everybuddy to run under winders but no one was doing it.
I've seen ports of a few GTK+ based programs, most notably nessus. Someone has ported GTK+ to winders, and that with cygwin apparently made the winders port of nessus quite easy. I would think it would also make a winders port of everybuddy equally easy because all of the basic stuff is there.
If that happened, then everybuddy running natively on winders would always be one step ahead of this theiving company's product. All the enhancements of an entire league of open source programs would be able to make everybuddy better and contain more features, and this company's product would always be trying to catch up with those features. Wouldn't it be better punishment to let the market ignore all their efforts? Or at the very least to make it so that whatever work they did is better spent by giving the work back to the open source project?
I don't have a clue about how easy it would be to port everybuddy to winders. But, doesn't this event necessitate it's being done? And if so, then would that fix the problem? And if so, is this a general course of action that could be taken to alleviate problems with GPL enforcement?
(Please remember before flaming and moderating me into oblivion that these are questions. If I knew the answers, I wouldn't have asked.)
The most interesting thing that I see in these pictures is that they mention the frame rate. The pics that I see have 8 FPS, 19 FPS, and 12 FPS respectively.
That's effectively unplayable.
But that's exactly my point. The database is the thing that saves you time because it knows where everything is on the system and keeps that information in an easily searchable format. I can't see how a packaging system w/out a database would be less hassle and save time. Everytime you had to install a package, you'd couldn't search the database to find the relevant information that you needed. You'd have to search the filesystem.
Or maybe I'm just missing what you mean. can you elaborate?
Right, but Debian (and Linux in general) depends almost entirely upon the donated time of its volunteers. The more volunteers, the larger the pool of donated time. Apt draws volunteers to Debian because it makes Debian better than most of the other distros. But if the value of Debian is replicated somewhere else, w/out all of the inconveniences of Debian, then your volunteer force diminishes. (Example inconvenience: almost no support from vendors who will only certify their products with RedHat.)
I'm sure the answer to this is that Debian will continue to exist if only one developer is working on it. But one developer can't do the entire thing, can't keep up with every package upgrade, bug list, new package, etc. There is a critical mass that is required to keep the distribution going. (There is a critical mass that is required to keep Linux going.) Does apt-rpm have the potential to lower the volunteer force below the critical mass? Clearly you think not, and you've given one example of why apt is not the only thing that makes debian great. Any more?
The solution to this, of course, is that you learn how to use the packaging system. So instead of just installing the thing that you want to install, you build a package for it and install the package. In the worst case scenario, you could build an empty package that only meets the dependancies that you are trying to meet.
I see the database as a tradeoff in the space vs speed deal. You can save space by not having a database, but determining if dependancies are met w/out a database will slow down your package management.