It's a pity they still use Bind instead of djbdns [cr.yp.to], which is a lot safer.
If you want us to ship djbdns, convince its author to put it under an Open Source license.
The current license is not acceptable.
I'm also surprised about KDE 2.2, since KDE 2.2.1 has been out for quite a while now
KDE is actually pseudo-2.2.1: We took 2.2, and merged all fixes from the stable CVS branch (and a couple of other patches).
Couldn't update to the official 2.2.1 because of the freeze - but the 2.2-* packages in 7.2 have all the fixes from 2.2.1 up to the day before it was released.
The same goes for the kernel version (2.4.7)
Which is actually 2.4.7 plus a lot of bugfixes from later versions, plus ext3, plus new drivers, and more.
Making sure the kernel is highly stable even under extreme load (and longer uptimes) takes time.
Re:to forestall the inevitable -- why not reiserfs
on
Red Hat 7.2 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
An official statement on why ext3 was chosen (ext2 compatibility is a major reason, but not the only one) can be found here.
Redhat has dropped support for Postfix (a sendmail replacement), which used to be on the Powertools CD. I really don't know why
It's because Powertools was dropped, and everything on Powertools that conflicts with something on a main CD (e.g. you can't install postfix and sendmail on the same system) had to go because at this time, the installer doesn't handle conflicting packages (breaking the "Everything" install isn't nice).
This is likely to get fixed in a future release (no promises though, it's not my decision [I'm all for postfix]).
Those who prefer it can grab the current official postfix package from rhcontrib. I'll open up the 7.2 section there later today.
Since it is a.2 version, RedHat is going to support it for a looong time
<obligatory "we don't preannounce releases" rant>
What makes you think the next release will be 8.0?;)
</rant>
Feel free to reuse the parts you like... It's intentionally mostly free of Microsoft- or patent-bashing (you know who will make the final decision...)
Unfortunately I didn't see Alan's reply before writing up mine, he surely has some points I should have included.
Anyway:
I believe the adaption of possibly non-royalty-free standards by W3C would
be a fatal mistake. Please take the time to consider the implications:
Non-profit organizations or individuals, such as open source developers, can no longer implement the w3c standards, effectively making browsing the web from open source operating systems impossible.
Right now, projects like Konqueror, Mozilla, Lynx, Links and even your own Amaya are doing a pretty good job - but they can't continue if they have to pay to implement the next set of standards.
Non-profit projects aside, it will also be much harder for a new company to get started because the barrier of entry will be much higher.
The Internet got where it is solely because it is based totally on open standards.
If you have been on the net long enough, you will have noticed that all attempts to create a similar infrastructure based on closed "standards" have ultimately failed (e.g. Europe Online) or turned to open standards, basically becoming an ISP and an internet portal (AOL,
Compuserve, MSN)
Consider what happened with the unisys patent and compressed gif graphics. When unisys started wanting royalties for gif pictures, pretty much everything on the net had to be converted, even though gif was never officially endorsed by w3c.
The problem becomes much bigger once someone starts charging royalties for something that is even a w3c standard (imagine some company finding
a reason for charging royalties on the a href= html tag).
There are already open formats for almost every purpose out there. If, for example, you can't get a guarantee that the SVG format will never require royalties, create/use an alternate standard. For an alternative to SVG, starting from Kontour (http://koffice.kde.org/)'s XML based vector graphics format comes to mind.
I can understand the reasoning behind allowing RAND; yet I think it will cause far more trouble than it's worth.
Please reconsider.
Worf: The Borg ship is following us and catching up!
Picard: Increase speed to warp 9.99999999999999999999999999999345671235...
[Borg ship destroys enterprise before Picard could finish stating the speed]
Similarily, I can easily tell you my old small car can go 180, and most British and American people won't believe me (because they'll think in terms of mph while I'm talking about kph).
Red Hat Linux packages available
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2
I just don't like the BS RH appears to be pulling with there RPMs. *VERY* few FTP sites are carrying there update RPMs. I think its on purpose, to get you to use the RH network.
This is plain not true. We don't control our mirrors any more than any other distribution does.
Everyone (yourself included) is free to mirror our packages, but we don't force anyone to do it.
There is no such open source/free software license because such a restriction would actually violate both the free software philosophy and the open source definition.
Also, something released under a license with that restriction would never get distributed too widely: Basically no OS could include the package. The only major Linux distribution that could include the package legally would be Debian, and they won't do it because they won't ship anything that isn't free.
Don't get me wrong, if they did copy the code and remove the copyright, that's a bad thing(tm).
But Microsoft doing the same thing would be worse.
Taking some open source code and releasing it as open source forgetting about the credits is not exactly the same as
taking open source code proprietary and not even bothering to mention where it was taken from.
I imagine you would need to patch Apache fairly regularly as well. Its not like its immune to worms or security holes.
It is not immune, but far less prone. In the approx. 5 years I've been using Apache on Linux, I've had to upgrade Apache for security reasons exactly 3 times.
Also, using mySQL, I can consistently crash my machine by trying to index a 5 million row table
If MySQL is causing problems, use Postgres (and vice versa).
As you might when converting from Windows to Linux. Where do I go? I can't just call my Debian rep and ask him to help me fix my problems.
If you need someone to blame, pick one of the commercially supported distributions.
It doesn't compile with 3.0.x because 3.0.x is broken (doesn't handle virtual inheritance correctly, making it unusable for any bigger chunk of C++ code).
Works perfectly with 2.96.
Re:RedHat binaries for stock 7.1 (seawolf)
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
·
· Score: 2
No, the by far most upgrade path is not installing any 3rd party packages, but waiting for the next version of the distribution and upgrading.
Therefore it is far more important to have sane packages in the tree that will constitute the next release (and simply scp'ing them over).
Good idea - please report this feature request in Bugzilla in the "distribution" component.
Maybe it'll make some of the people in control see reason.;)
Re:RedHat binaries for stock 7.1 (seawolf)
on
KDE 2.2.1 Up
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I realize that this might be causing problems for some people, but there reasons are simple: timing issues.
Try maintaining 215 packages while not giving up your own devel projects, and you'll know what I mean.
If a day had 48 hours, I'd of course provide RPMs for 7.1, 7.0 and probably even 6.x - but the way things are now, I simply don't have the time to set up boxes with old systems to rebuild the packages and work around legacy compiler bugs (egcs 1.1.x is a pain).
If you want to rebuild them, feel free to do so. In the mean time, I think it's more important to have a nice KDE in the upcoming release, so that's what I'm focusing on.
making the source available does NOT make an open source project.
If the source is made available under a good license, it does - people who are not satisfied with what the maintainer does can just fork it. Some of those forks have been quite successful and needed (remember egcs?).
They do.
AFAIK current versions of M$IE take you to msn.com immediately (controlling information). Thanks to Smart Tags(tm), they'll provide you with whatever related information they see fit, even if you avoid accessing msn.com.
By attempting to monopolize M$IE and Media Player, they control how you receive information. Once they've succeeded killing of competitors, they'll add censoring of "dangerous" websites (e.g. linux.org, redhat.com) to their monopolist information access kit.
The reason Microsoft is more dangerous is primarily that Microsoft is a danger internationally.
AOL is a big ISP in some European countries, but nowhere near the biggest.
Time Warner isn't important outside the US.
Most people in Europe don't even know CNN exists.
Netscape is mostly gone anyway.
AT&T isn't important in Europe.
Microsoft is more dangerous - they own a huge market share pretty much anywhere in the world.
Ideally, boycott both - but killing Microsoft is more important.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a pity they still use Bind instead of djbdns [cr.yp.to], which is a lot safer.
If you want us to ship djbdns, convince its author to put it under an Open Source license.
The current license is not acceptable.
I'm also surprised about KDE 2.2, since KDE 2.2.1 has been out for quite a while now
KDE is actually pseudo-2.2.1: We took 2.2, and merged all fixes from the stable CVS branch (and a couple of other patches).
Couldn't update to the official 2.2.1 because of the freeze - but the 2.2-* packages in 7.2 have all the fixes from 2.2.1 up to the day before it was released.
The same goes for the kernel version (2.4.7)
Which is actually 2.4.7 plus a lot of bugfixes from later versions, plus ext3, plus new drivers, and more.
Making sure the kernel is highly stable even under extreme load (and longer uptimes) takes time.
An official statement on why ext3 was chosen (ext2 compatibility is a major reason, but not the only one) can be found here.
Redhat has dropped support for Postfix (a sendmail replacement), which used to be on the Powertools CD. I really don't know why
.2 version, RedHat is going to support it for a looong time
;)
It's because Powertools was dropped, and everything on Powertools that conflicts with something on a main CD (e.g. you can't install postfix and sendmail on the same system) had to go because at this time, the installer doesn't handle conflicting packages (breaking the "Everything" install isn't nice).
This is likely to get fixed in a future release (no promises though, it's not my decision [I'm all for postfix]).
Those who prefer it can grab the current official postfix package from rhcontrib. I'll open up the 7.2 section there later today.
Since it is a
<obligatory "we don't preannounce releases" rant>
What makes you think the next release will be 8.0?
</rant>
Unfortunately I didn't see Alan's reply before writing up mine, he surely has some points I should have included.
Anyway:
I believe the adaption of possibly non-royalty-free standards by W3C would
be a fatal mistake. Please take the time to consider the implications:
Right now, projects like Konqueror, Mozilla, Lynx, Links and even your own Amaya are doing a pretty good job - but they can't continue if they have to pay to implement the next set of standards.
If you have been on the net long enough, you will have noticed that all attempts to create a similar infrastructure based on closed "standards" have ultimately failed (e.g. Europe Online) or turned to open standards, basically becoming an ISP and an internet portal (AOL,
Compuserve, MSN)
The problem becomes much bigger once someone starts charging royalties for something that is even a w3c standard (imagine some company finding
a reason for charging royalties on the a href= html tag).
I can understand the reasoning behind allowing RAND; yet I think it will cause far more trouble than it's worth.
Please reconsider.
You'd think they'd violate the Prime Directive to at least put an end to Windows XP.
;)
This would not be a violation of the Prime Directive.
See Microsoft Trek for the reasoning.
Redefinition of the scale. Imagine:
Worf: The Borg ship is following us and catching up!
Picard: Increase speed to warp 9.99999999999999999999999999999345671235...
[Borg ship destroys enterprise before Picard could finish stating the speed]
Similarily, I can easily tell you my old small car can go 180, and most British and American people won't believe me (because they'll think in terms of mph while I'm talking about kph).
Red Hat Linux RPMs are available here.
I just don't like the BS RH appears to be pulling with there RPMs. *VERY* few FTP sites are carrying there update RPMs. I think its on purpose, to get you to use the RH network.
This is plain not true. We don't control our mirrors any more than any other distribution does.
Everyone (yourself included) is free to mirror our packages, but we don't force anyone to do it.
There is no such open source/free software license because such a restriction would actually violate both the free software philosophy and the open source definition.
Also, something released under a license with that restriction would never get distributed too widely: Basically no OS could include the package. The only major Linux distribution that could include the package legally would be Debian, and they won't do it because they won't ship anything that isn't free.
No, I'm not forgetting them. I'm just saying you still need to make a difference.
A similar example:
Person A steals $100. He's broke and uses the money to buy food to prevent his family from starving.
Person B steals $100. He already has $999,900 and simply steals the $100 to be a millionaire.
They've both done the same thing, but I think most people will agree with me that what B did is worse than what A did.
Don't get me wrong, if they did copy the code and remove the copyright, that's a bad thing(tm).
But Microsoft doing the same thing would be worse.
Taking some open source code and releasing it as open source forgetting about the credits is not exactly the same as
taking open source code proprietary and not even bothering to mention where it was taken from.
I imagine you would need to patch Apache fairly regularly as well. Its not like its immune to worms or security holes.
It is not immune, but far less prone. In the approx. 5 years I've been using Apache on Linux, I've had to upgrade Apache for security reasons exactly 3 times.
Also, using mySQL, I can consistently crash my machine by trying to index a 5 million row table
If MySQL is causing problems, use Postgres (and vice versa).
As you might when converting from Windows to Linux. Where do I go? I can't just call my Debian rep and ask him to help me fix my problems.
If you need someone to blame, pick one of the commercially supported distributions.
Correction: It actually compiles with 3.0.x, but the resulting binaries don't work because of the compiler bug I mentioned.
It doesn't compile with 3.0.x because 3.0.x is broken (doesn't handle virtual inheritance correctly, making it unusable for any bigger chunk of C++ code).
Works perfectly with 2.96.
No, the by far most upgrade path is not installing any 3rd party packages, but waiting for the next version of the distribution and upgrading.
Therefore it is far more important to have sane packages in the tree that will constitute the next release (and simply scp'ing them over).
Good idea - please report this feature request in Bugzilla in the "distribution" component.
;)
Maybe it'll make some of the people in control see reason.
I realize that this might be causing problems for some people, but there reasons are simple: timing issues.
Try maintaining 215 packages while not giving up your own devel projects, and you'll know what I mean.
If a day had 48 hours, I'd of course provide RPMs for 7.1, 7.0 and probably even 6.x - but the way things are now, I simply don't have the time to set up boxes with old systems to rebuild the packages and work around legacy compiler bugs (egcs 1.1.x is a pain).
If you want to rebuild them, feel free to do so. In the mean time, I think it's more important to have a nice KDE in the upcoming release, so that's what I'm focusing on.
If that happens, I'll try to get Red Hat to pick it up - no success guarantee though.
making the source available does NOT make an open source project.
If the source is made available under a good license, it does - people who are not satisfied with what the maintainer does can just fork it. Some of those forks have been quite successful and needed (remember egcs?).
It's still in its early stages, actually they're still building up the case.
They're accepting input on the M$ case, by the way.
The address for the EU competition office is (obfuscated - sending them spam won't do us any good)
Infocomp [at] [put "cec" here] dot eu dot int
Or, if you prefer snailmail
Linda Jones
Information officer, DG Competition
European Commission
200 Rue de la Loi; J-70 0/123
1049 Bruxelles
Belgium
The worst thing the EU can order, though, is a financial penalty, AFAIK.
They do.
AFAIK current versions of M$IE take you to msn.com immediately (controlling information). Thanks to Smart Tags(tm), they'll provide you with whatever related information they see fit, even if you avoid accessing msn.com.
By attempting to monopolize M$IE and Media Player, they control how you receive information. Once they've succeeded killing of competitors, they'll add censoring of "dangerous" websites (e.g. linux.org, redhat.com) to their monopolist information access kit.
The reason Microsoft is more dangerous is primarily that Microsoft is a danger internationally.
AOL is a big ISP in some European countries, but nowhere near the biggest.
Time Warner isn't important outside the US.
Most people in Europe don't even know CNN exists.
Netscape is mostly gone anyway.
AT&T isn't important in Europe.
Microsoft is more dangerous - they own a huge market share pretty much anywhere in the world.
Ideally, boycott both - but killing Microsoft is more important.
We voted him in, blech.
"We" as in "The people who manipulated the votes and intentionally miscounted ballots"? SCNR...
So what can someone outside of the US do about this? Playing Microsoft (sending fake letters ;) ) is probably not the right thing to do. ;)