On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 01:09:51PM +0100, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote: > > On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 01:27:39PM +0200, Anton Zinoviev wrote: > > This is what I would do if I was in your position: [...] > > > your proposal is completely useless to users in my position. > > console-setup *does* break console-data, because its mere presence makes > the debconf setup of console-data ineffective (note that this also
Console-setup doesn't break console-data for the following reasons: 1. console-setup can use the fonts and/or keymaps of console-data; 2. console-setup can be configured not to overwrite the configuration of console-data. > i don't care whether that results in a dpkg Breaks statement, but the > situation must be made *damn obvious* to make system upgrades not just > plain broken from a user perspective. It won't be a big deal to add a Debconf dialog to console-date explaining that by default its configuration will be overwriten by console-setup. Another option is to remove completely from console-data all Debconf configuration and /etc/init.d scripts as console-setup can do almost everything these scripts can. > and get over the idea that free software is all about choice (for its > own sake). there is enough research which discredits this position. In a pefrect world you would be right. Unfortunately, these days we are witnessing more and more software acting in malicious way. Free software is not about the choice, but considering the power software developers have over the users, giving the users the right to chose (in a non-obtrusive way) can be a sort of self-restraint for the developers and a protection for the users. I will try to explain myself. Some people say aspartame is bad for the health, others say it is not. Are the lay people competent to make the right choice for themselves? Certainly not, and yet - nobody has the right to impose his opinion on the others just because he considers himself more competent! What I've just wrote is not unrelated to software. Firefox reports to Google any address you visit. This report contains unique identification of your browser even when it is in the so called "Privacy mode" so Google knows everything about your habits. Fortunately one can easily turn off this spying by turning off the blocking of the so called "attacking sites" and "web forgeries". In result we have the following: 1. The users are provided with some defaults so they don't have to configure anything. Good. 2. The users are provided with easy way to change these defaults. Also good. 3. The users are not informed in any way about the implications of their choice. In particular, nowhere in the configuration dialogs of Firefox the users are informed that Google is going to track their activities. This is not good and I suppose in some jurisdictions this is capital offence. Anyway, that's not my point. My point is this: consider the version of Firefox for Android and ask yourself why it doesn't give the users the right to turn off the spying?[*] Isn't it developed by the same developers? It is. Then why? In my opinion the main reason is that the general users of GNU/Linux are more demanding about their rights than the general users of Android who are used to the fact that the programs report their activity. Even the open source programs for Android often report program crashes without user's agreement. Even non-free programs for GNU/Linux don't do this. So you see -- it is not about open source or not open-source but rather about what we are used to. Thats the reason of my position -- I want us to be vigiliant and extremely demanding about our rights from the independent developers of free software. For example I am not that much concerned that Google tracks all movements of the users of Android phones by the so called "wifi network location" and uses the users phones in order to build commercial database of the wifi's all over the world. After all such sort of things we can expect from Google. But I am deeply concerned by the fact that there are independent developers of open source programs (I hesitate to call these programs free software) that do similar things. Anton Zinoviev [*] It is possible to turn off this spying by visiting the page about:config and doing some magic. Google won't tell you how. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
