Re: Proposed documentation/script changes for potato (ntp/chrony/util-linux)
On Mon, Jan 31, 2000 at 01:56:54AM -0200, Henrique M Holschuh wrote: > Attached you'll find context diff files against files in the ntp, chrony and > util-linux packages, as well as a new README.Debian.hwclock file for the > util-linux package. I don't read debian-devel frequently, so I just caught up on all this discussion, however I did file one of the bugs about this. Thank you for taking on this issue! I have one problem: > To set the date/time of the system, just use the standard UNIX date facilities > (such as date) This advice ignores the admonitions I've read in many places that one should never adjust the system clock discontinuously, especially not backwards. Do you have any thoughts on this? Andrew
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Bug#972996: ITP: nccm -- Terminal based ssh connection manager
Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist Owner: Andrew * Package name: nccm Version : 1.2.0 Upstream Author : Kenneth Aaron * URL : https://github.com/flyingrhinonz/nccm * License : GPL3 Programming Lang: Python Description : Terminal based ssh connection manager This is a terminal based (ncurses) ssh connection manager. Configuration is done via a yaml file and each connection can be configured with user@host, a comment, an identity file and general ssh options. The list can be searched directly from the command line and, if more than one match exists, an ncurses interface is presented to select the required host. The search is done on any configured field and the interface permits ordering based on any of the displayed fields. - why is this package useful/relevant? This package lets you easily keep track of hosts when you have a lot to connect to. Once you configure it you can just type in nccm mail and access the host that, say, has mail in the comment field. If more than one matches then it puts up an ncurses interface to let you select one from a filtered list of mail hosts. - how do you plan to maintain it? It's a simple package so I plan on doing it myself in my own git repo (https://github.com/rubiksdot/nccm). I am in contact with the author and have already submitted patches to the utility. Communication with him is good and have found him very responsive to suggestions I've given him as well bug reports.
Bug#1076329: ITP: libmarkdown-render-perl -- Render markdown using Text::Markdown::Discount or GitHub API
Package: wnpp Owner: Andrew Ruthven Severity: wishlist X-Debbugs-CC: debian-devel@lists.debian.org, debian-p...@lists.debian.org * Package name: libmarkdown-render-perl Version : 1.04 Upstream Author : Rob Lauer * URL : https://metacpan.org/release/Markdown-Render * License : Artistic or GPL-1+ Programming Lang: Perl Description : Render markdown using Text::Markdown::Discount or GitHub API Markdown::Render provides both a Perl module and a command line tool to render markdown as HTML using either Text::Markdown::Discount or GitHub's API. They can replace tags included in the markdown with a number of different types of metadata. This package is a build dependency for request-tracker5 >= v5.0.6, and is required to allow me to update the request-tracker5 packages. The package will be maintained under the umbrella of the Debian Perl Group. -- Generated with the help of dpt-gen-itp(1) from pkg-perl-tools. -- Andrew Ruthven, Wellington, New Zealand and...@etc.gen.nz | Catalyst Cloud: | This space intentionally left blank https://catalystcloud.nz | signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part
Re: Security updates for sarge?
On Sat, Oct 23, 2004 at 02:43:18PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 05:10:26 +0200, Sven Mueller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > > > Ingo Juergensmann [u] wrote on 22/10/2004 18:35: > >> On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 06:13:46PM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote: > >> > >>> Because they have set up and maintain the buildd network. > >> Yes, nice, well done, thank them for their initial work, but it > >> seems as if it's up for others now to take over that job, because > >> they obviously failing continuously doing it now. > > > I must admit I thought something similar: Why the hell are there > > only two people who know how to do it, when two people doesn't seem > > to be enough? > > Are you volunteering to go out and better educate yourself to > take on this work? I would like to volunteer. Please give me some pointers on how I could better educate myself, as I have an interest in increasing my understanding of the "back-end" of what makes the distribution tick. regards Andrew -- linux.conf.au 2005 - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - Birthplace of Tux April 18th to 23rd - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - LINUX Canberra, Australia - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ -Get bitten! signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Ubuntu discussion at planet.debian.org
On Fri, Oct 22, 2004 at 12:25:48PM +0200, Jérôme Marant wrote: > Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > On 20041022T134825+0200, Jérôme Marant wrote: > >> Before "testing", the RM used to freeze unstable and people were > >> working on fixing bugs. There were pretest cycles with bug horizons, > >> and freezes were shorter. > > > > That's not true (unless you are talking about something that was ceased > > several years before testing became live, certainly before I started > > following Debian development in 1998). Before testing the RM used to > > fork unstable into a "frozen" distribution. Unstable was still open for > > development, and heated arguments developed on this very list asking > > that the process be changed so that unstable would be frozen; this was > > never done. > > > > I don't know what you mean by "pretest cycles with bug horizons". > > > > You are correct. It seems so old to me that I didn't even recall > it was a fork. This indeed explains why that process had to > be improved. It also explains why the current process needs to > be improved as well. > > Thanks to Ubuntu, we now have a good example of what's proven > to work. > I think it is premature to declare that Ubuntu's model works any better than what we're currently doing, in the long run. regards Andrew -- linux.conf.au 2005 - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - Birthplace of Tux April 18th to 23rd - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - LINUX Canberra, Australia - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ -Get bitten!
Mass bug filing: build depends on libtool1.4
Hi, I was having a bit of a stab at the orphaned package list today, and noticed that libtool1.4 is down to be removed after Sarge releases. The following packages still declare a build dependency on libtool1.4: Maintainer: Dima Barsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Package: cyrus-sasl Maintainer: Junichi Uekawa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Package: ecasound Maintainer: Paul Hampson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Package: freeradius Maintainer: Paul Slootman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Package: isdnutils Maintainer: Sebastien Bacher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Package: libgtop Maintainer: Anibal Monsalve Salazar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Package: rpm Maintainer: Jeff Teunissen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Package: wsoundserver Should I file a bug against these packages requesting that they update their build dependencies? wsoundserver already has such a bug filed, so there would be 6 bugs filed in total. regards Andrew -- linux.conf.au 2005 - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - Birthplace of Tux April 18th to 23rd - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - LINUX Canberra, Australia - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ -Get bitten!
Re: Bug#262507: ITP: resmgr -- resource manager library
On Wed, Oct 27, 2004 at 05:03:43PM +0200, Julien BLACHE wrote: > For those of you interested, I've uploaded resmgr 1.0-1 to > experimental (must go through NEW, etc.). > > I'll upload a version of sane-backends built with resmgr support to > experimental when sane-backends 1.0.15 will be released (end of next > week, IIRC). > > I plan to have SANE built with resmgr support for Etch, and I hope > other applications will support resmgr too. It can make life a lot > easier, and changes to the code are really minimal. It is, however, a security hole; it's functionally equivalent to pam_console (which we declined to ship in the past) and has the same problems. As such it's not really an improvement in security over making devices group- or world-accessible. resmgr must not be enabled by default and should carry a big warning; you can only use it in scenarios where you would be willing to use pam_console. (Why somebody bothered to implement resmgr instead of simply enhancing pam_console is beyond me; probably NIH) -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#262507: ITP: resmgr -- resource manager library
On Thu, Oct 28, 2004 at 08:46:18PM +0200, Julien BLACHE wrote: > >> I plan to have SANE built with resmgr support for Etch, and I hope > >> other applications will support resmgr too. It can make life a lot > >> easier, and changes to the code are really minimal. > > > > It is, however, a security hole; it's functionally equivalent to > > pam_console (which we declined to ship in the past) and has the same > > It's a bit better than pam_console, however, which has a lot of > issues. > > I uploaded to experimental to get some feedback on the possible > security issues/implications; I'm still trying to determine whether > there are holes (read: bigger holes than those which can exist with > other solutions) or not. > > Could you point out the security issues you see in resmgr ? The primary one is the same as pam_console: once you have an fd open, you can keep it open for as long as you like. So all the fancy restrictions on when you can open a device don't actually do anything; if you can open it at any time, you have effective access, reducing it to the same level of security as group permissions. (Doing something about this would require either a genuine userspace *proxy*, or kernel support; there's a few proposals floating around about how pam_console could have done it right). While it may make sense on some public terminals or demonstration systems, you do not want it on hosts where device security is important. [Also, it's a liability to have a process running as root which opens devices and then hands fds over to non-root processes; it could form part of a privilege escalation attack. So you don't want it running without a good reason]. > I note that SuSE ships resmgr and has a couple of resmgr-enabled > applications. Of course, RedHat ships pam_console, so that's not a > point (and they're having a whole lot of problems with it, again). Yes, they just don't care. Secure-by-default isn't really a priority for them. If you run a server on suse then resmgr is one of those things you have to go through and rip out, like pam_console on redhat. > - resmgrd isn't installed by default, you need to explicitly install >it (no dependencies, only a Recommends that could be downgraded to >a Suggests to avoid side-effects with some frontends to apt); I'd say that's the really important one; we need to keep it that way. > - resmgrd won't be started until configured (no default config >is shipped in the package, only an example config file); And that's probably a good idea too (along with documentation that clearly states what it does and does *not* do). > > (Why somebody bothered to implement resmgr instead of simply enhancing > > pam_console is beyond me; probably NIH) > > If you haven't already, you might want to read > <http://rechner.lst.de/~okir/resmgr/description.html> Yeah, they gave up on the puzzle of how to fix pam_console without really trying. It's not as hard as they made it look; mostly you just have to add hotplug support, and have pam_console itself record the current user in a file or process someplace. Quite ironically, the solutions to the problems they cite for pam_console are exactly the same as the solutions they implemented for resmgr. Hence I figure it was probably NIH. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#281331: ITP: dstat -- versatile resource statistics tool
Package: wnpp Severity: wishlist * Package name: dstat Version : 0.5.2 Upstream Author : Dag Wieers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> * URL : http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/dstat/ * License : GPL Description : versatile resource statistics tool Dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat and ifstat. Dstat overcomes some of the limitations of these programs and adds some extra features. Dstat allows you to view all of your network resources instantly, you can for example, compare disk usage in combination with interrupts from your IDE controller, or compare the network bandwidth numbers directly with the disk throughput (in the same interval). Dstat also cleverly gives you the most detailed information in columns and clearly indicates in what magnitude and unit the output is displayed. Dstat is also unique in letting you aggregate block device throughput for a certain diskset or network bandwidth for a group of interfaces, i.e. you can see the throughput for all the block devices that make up a single filesystem or storage system. Dstat's output, in its current form, is not suited for post-processing by other tools, it's mostly meant for humans to interprete real-time data as easy as possible. -- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 APT prefers testing APT policy: (500, 'testing') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-1-686 Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C
Re: crash of csh
On Mon, Nov 15, 2004 at 05:26:19PM +0100, Nico Golde wrote: > hi, > is the maintainer of the bash currently the same as the maintainer of > the csh? Don't think so: [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~$ grep-available -s Package,Maintainer -P --eregex '^bash$|^csh$' Package: csh Maintainer: Matej Vela <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Package: bash Maintainer: Matthias Klose <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > if have a segmentation fault with the csh. > the csh still crashs if you run eval '\!\!' in it. All the more reason to use a better shell, or file a bug. regards Andrew -- linux.conf.au 2005 - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - Birthplace of Tux April 18th to 23rd - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - LINUX Canberra, Australia - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ -Get bitten!
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor
On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 08:50:08PM +0200, Kalle Kivimaa wrote: > Even > though we shouldn't exclude offensive packages we have the right to > make moral judgements and try to keep the higher priorities > content-neutral. Moral judgements from a group as large and diverse as Debian are guaranteed to always have conflicting results. No matter what your position on an issue, somebody in the project disagrees with you. Get over it. The only genuinely neutral content is the output of /dev/random; all else is subjective. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor
On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 08:49:18AM +1100, Brian May wrote: > However, I get the impression that giving children access to nude > pictures is generally considered wrong in a number of different > cultures and countries. > > This is different from the Bible - if you find the bible offensive you > don't have to install it. > > If you don't want your kids to install nude pictures, they might find > it on a source you hadn't anticipated (a Debian CD of all things) and > install it without your permission. Anybody who can't obtain porn using only the tools provided on a Debian CD is a total moron. You might as well complain that the internet is bad, just because it's primarily used as a vehicle for delivering porn. [And that's without even starting on this insane notion that trying to stop kids from seeing porn is somehow a good idea] -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor
On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 11:47:47PM +, Will Newton wrote: > On Wednesday 01 Dec 2004 22:15, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > > Anybody who can't obtain porn using only the tools provided on a > > Debian CD is a total moron. You might as well complain that the > > internet is bad, just because it's primarily used as a vehicle for > > delivering porn. > > No. We are talking about "distributing" hot-babe. You didn't read the mail I was replying to, did you? -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor
On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 02:07:45AM +0100, Jonas Meurer wrote: > but people should never be criticised or even discriminated for their > skin color, origin, gender, ... Gender is a choice. You just offended a whole bunch of transsexuals. If you're going to be a patronising hippie, at least get it right. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: ldap - a completely new method for fetching lists of packages?
On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 01:56:21PM -0500, sean finney wrote: > On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 12:03:27PM -0500, Simon Law wrote: > > On Thu, Dec 02, 2004 at 11:47:38AM -0500, sean finney wrote: > > > please, please treat this machine politely. it's my workstation and > > > i have no qualms with turning off slapd if it's getting in the > > > way :) > > > > If you're using OpenLDAP, there is no way that this could ever be fast. > > sounds like you have some experience with openldap too :) > > seriously though, i think it could in many situations... as it stands now, > apt has to refetch the Sources/Packages.gz files from every source > listed in sources.list. > > now, if the apt method kept a timestamp of the last successful update, > it could send as part of the ldap query filter something like > '(debTimeStamp>$lasttime)'. this would make keeping debian up to > date over dialup a much easier experience i imagine. Or you could just use something like rsync. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: OT: appealing to the puritan interest [was Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor]
On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 03:20:48PM -0500, Clint Adams wrote: > > You can't distribute text with the word "fuck" in it anywhere to minors in > > the > > US? > > > > Truly remarkable. Are there any minors reading this? Where do I hand myself > > in? > > Well, you would need to check the penal codes of each individual state > wherein such a minor resides; [...] > I don't > know how this applies to offenders from the UK. We tell them to fuck off. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activity monitor
> > >>>As already written in -women, this is the point which saddens me the > > >>>most in this thread. I'm really disappointed by seeing most > > >>>contributors just not realize why this package, as proposed, is > > >>>likely to hurt the feelings of several women (probably not all, I > > >>>don't know) as well as, indirectly or not, some men. (And quite stunningly failing to realise that objecting to this package in this manner is equally offensive in the other direction, and probably more so. I'm always entertained by the hypocrisy of these people). > > > Packages can hurts feelings? It's your big conclusion about it? Don't > > > matters for you the obvious detail about gender equality? > > > >requiring gender equality is obviosly pretty damn sexist. > > I can't see why. The whole free software concept brings an idea of > giving equal oportunities to everyone. How is it "equal opportunities" to say: "You can't do that unless you also find a woman who's willing to do it as well"? > Fortunately, as I said, the code > is available, and the equal oportunity for adding pictures that taste > good for each one actually do exist. > > That does not solve the problem, but makes it pretty easy to solve. The problem doesn't exist. There is no absence of opportunity here. There is only absence of action from some parties. Just because you elect not to engage in an action doesn't mean you can claim that nobody else should engage in that action. Not even under some misguided notion of "equality". If somebody was saying "We can have pictures of naked girls in the archive, but not naked men" then you *might* have a valid point. But they aren't. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Legal budget and Director-and-officer insurance related to packages with "adult" themes
On Sat, Dec 04, 2004 at 02:33:44PM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > There are a few people who are most likely to be prosecuted over legal > issues in Debian packages that have "adult" themes. They are the SPI > directors, and those affiliated with any registration or incorporation > of SPI or Debian in countries other than the U.S. Oh come on, they're at far greater risk from our overly-permissive approach to copyright and patent issues. Any halfway decent lawyer could run rings around our review process; it's nothing like "due dillgance". I think the statutory punishments stand at tens of thousands of dollars and up to five years in jail, in the US at present. And there are people with legal muscle who have demonstrated a desire to make attacks on this front. If you're going to do something like this, at least get your priorities straight. If it's necessary for one thing then it's necessary for everything. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Legal budget and Director-and-officer insurance related to packages with "adult" themes
On Sat, Dec 04, 2004 at 07:14:07PM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > Andrew Suffield wrote: > > >Oh come on, they're at far greater risk from our overly-permissive > >approach to copyright and patent issues. > > > The copyright and patent problems faced by Debian are issues that we > have studied in depth. Indeed, working on that has taken up a good deal > of my life for the past several years. We have resources lined up to > help us when it becomes a problem. > > In contrast, those resources aren't inclined to help us with the > questionable-material problem, and we have not researched it at all. If > we're going to make a stand about it, we'd better start learning. You go off and do that then, and leave the rest of us out of it like you did with the much more serious issue of copyright and patent laws. You evidently managed it once without any money (since we haven't got any), so clearly you can do it again. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#284283: ITP: fairuse -- spam filter based on sender identity verification
On Sat, Dec 04, 2004 at 11:51:29PM -0800, Stephen Birch wrote: > * License : Free for non-commercial use > > Subject to license verification (DFSG compliant): Non-commercial-use-only licenses are non-free. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activity monitor
On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 09:34:36PM +1100, Ben Burton wrote: > > > > > >>>As already written in -women, this is the point which saddens me the > > > > >>>most in this thread. I'm really disappointed by seeing most > > > > >>>contributors just not realize why this package, as proposed, is > > > > >>>likely to hurt the feelings of several women (probably not all, I > > > > >>>don't know) as well as, indirectly or not, some men. > > > > (And quite stunningly failing to realise that objecting to this > > package in this manner is equally offensive in the other direction, > > and probably more so. > > Please humour me and spell it out for me in small words. I am > presumably missing something stunningly obvious. I find the notion of introducing censorship in order to not 'hurt their feelings' to be morally repugnant. It has been proven endless times that once you start doing this, you can't stop. For any package, there is going to be some minority group that is offended by it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor
On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 02:23:52PM +0100, Jonas Meurer wrote: > On 05/12/2004 James Foster wrote: > > Pornography may be offensive to some. Is the package description for > > hot-babe accurate? Are people who do not want it installed being > > forced to install it? > > > > People who may be offended by the package should read its description > > and make up their own mind about whether or not they would like to > > install it. > > > > [...] > > > > There's no excuse for censorship, ever. > > so you would even accept nazi propaganda material in debian, just > because you dislike censorship? Hell yes. This said it best, I think: [...] freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society and one of the basic conditions for its progress and each individual's self-fulfilment. [...] it is applicable not only to "information" or "ideas" that are favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb. Such are the demands of pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness, without which there is no "democratic society". [Even if this 'democratic society' label is somewhat misnamed]. > in my eyes there shouldn't be any tolerance for intolerance, as you > woun't get respect in return. rather your tolerance will be exploited. Precisely. If we tolerate the intolerance of these people who are so terrified of images of the naked female form, then they will continue to exploit our tolerance. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor
On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 08:45:56AM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote: > On 05-Dec-04, 04:55 (CST), James Foster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > There's no excuse for censorship, ever. > > > > Okay everybody, repeat after me: Choosing not to distribute a given > package is NOT censorship. And telling somebody else that they can't distribute a given package IS censorship. You evidently have chosen not to do it. That's not censorship. You're presumably also trying to tell somebody else not to do it. That's censorship. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor
On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 03:55:27PM +, Matthew Garrett wrote: > Andrew Suffield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > [...] freedom of expression constitutes one of the essential > > foundations of a democratic society and one of the basic conditions > > for its progress and each individual's self-fulfilment. > > > > [...] it is applicable not only to "information" or "ideas" that are > > favourably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of > > indifference, but also to those that offend, shock or disturb. Such > > are the demands of pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness, without > > which there is no "democratic society". > > > > Debian is not a democratic society. You carefully deleted the part where I said that was a lousy name for it. The original authors have a 'democracy' fetish; they meant 'free'. > It is not intended to be a source of > all information known to man. It is supposed to be a project to produce > a Free operating system. That means: > > a) Things that are not useful should not be in there For a very weak definition of 'should', and a very broad definition of 'useful', sure. > b) Things that are gratuitously insulting to a large number of people > should not be there unless they're fantastically useful That's entirely arbitrary. You can't just make this stuff up. In no sense does this follow from the stuff quoted above. You've also introduced the undefined quantifiers 'gratuitously', 'insulting', 'large', and 'fantastically', so that can mean anything you want. > Having this argument over a program that is entirely useless in the > first place just makes it harder to have a proper discussion in the > cases where it actually matters. On the contrary, it makes it easier (you are aware that this is not the first time this subject has occurred?). > Or, putting it another way: failing to include this piece of code does > Debian no demonstrable harm. However, deliberately refusing to include it because of some people whining does Debian quite significant, demonstrable harm. It indicates that merely by whining loud enough you can eject arbitrary code from Debian. > Including it does. Can't see any. If you're trying to raise the old "Debian must attract more users" thing then we've been over it so many times already: Debian in no sense gains or loses from changes in its userbase of less than an order of magnitude. And it's only the accuracy of bug reporting that improves anyway. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor
On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 12:21:04PM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote: > On 05-Dec-04, 09:07 (CST), Andrew Suffield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 08:45:56AM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote: > > > On 05-Dec-04, 04:55 (CST), James Foster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > > > There's no excuse for censorship, ever. > > > > > > > > > > Okay everybody, repeat after me: Choosing not to distribute a given > > > package is NOT censorship. > > > > And telling somebody else that they can't distribute a given package > > IS censorship. > > I haven't told anyone that they can't distribute it. We, Debian, can > choose not to distribute certain materials w/o it being censorship. You say it as if the whole project was in agreement about something. What is actually happening here is that one individual Debian developer is choosing to distribute a given package, and some other developers are trying to stop them. That's censorship. Even if they don't have the authority to do it (that just makes it ineffective censorship). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activity monitor
On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 08:52:59AM +1100, Ben Burton wrote: > > > I find the notion of introducing censorship in order to not 'hurt > > their feelings' to be morally repugnant. > > Yes yes, I understand why you don't like it. What I wanted was an > explanation of why objecting to this package was probably _more_ > offensive than proposing it. "Oh no, there's the possibility that somebody else might look at some low quality porn" versus "Other people are actively forcing their beliefs onto us". Isn't it obvious? > (Bearing in mind that in this context, "censorship" simply means not > shipping with debian, as opposed to attempting to deny access altogether.) That's what "censorship" means in every context, under any practical definition. It's impossible to deny access altogether to anything. > > It has been proven endless times that once you start doing this, you > > can't stop. For any package, there is going to be some minority group > > that is offended by it. > > Sounds to me like your problem is not so much with the objection, but with > its expected implementation. There's only one way this ever goes. Any student of history should be familiar with how this plays out. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Legal budget and Director-and-officer insurance related to packages with "adult" themes
On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 04:23:25PM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > I worked on the patent and copyright issues because Debian and indeed > all of Free Software would be up the river if people did not work on it. > I have arranged more than $120K of grants to work on this since leaving HP. > > That is not the case for packages with questionable images and dialogue. > I'm not volunteering, and neither are the people who gave me money. Then file a bug, but don't whinge about how other people aren't doing something that you care about. That's how Debian works. You do the stuff you're interested in (frequently without mentioning it to anybody else, in some cases). Your Chicken Little act is not impressing anybody. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: charsets in debian/control
On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 09:32:00PM +0100, Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo wrote: > But the only field in UTF8 should be Maintainer, and that field should > have (IMHO) also a roman transliterate for the name, if you don't use a > latin charset (Greek, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese...) The transliterated field should be called 'Maintainer'. If you want some other freaky encoding, unsupported by the older tools, put it in a new field. Using the old field just breaks stuff for no reason. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Questionable image process. Was: Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- (abusive?) erotic images in Debian
On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 05:15:50PM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > >Somewhere else in the thread I made the point that people have to respect > >each other and that everyone using Debian is subject to local laws. > > > > > That is two different issues: > 1: Developers should respect each other. Which means not forcing their beliefs onto others. > 2: Developers in various localities can get in legal hot water due to > the conduct of other developers who don't run the same risk. That sounds pretty unlikely. The project does not exist as a legal entity (but rather uses quasi-independent holding companies like SPI) for this reason (as well as the logistical difficulties it would present). If your country routinely holds you responsible for the actions of people in other countries who you just happen to communicate with on occasion, or that you share interests with, then you really need to emigrate or revolt. Mine doesn't. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor
On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 08:33:54PM -0500, Josh Metzler wrote: > On Sunday 05 December 2004 08:25 pm, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 12:21:04PM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote: > > > On 05-Dec-04, 09:07 (CST), Andrew Suffield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 08:45:56AM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote: > > > > > On 05-Dec-04, 04:55 (CST), James Foster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: > > > > > > There's no excuse for censorship, ever. > > > > > > > > > > Okay everybody, repeat after me: Choosing not to distribute a given > > > > > package is NOT censorship. > > > > > > > > And telling somebody else that they can't distribute a given package > > > > IS censorship. > > > > > > I haven't told anyone that they can't distribute it. We, Debian, can > > > choose not to distribute certain materials w/o it being censorship. > > > > You say it as if the whole project was in agreement about something. > > > > What is actually happening here is that one individual Debian > > developer is choosing to distribute a given package, and some other > > developers are trying to stop them. That's censorship. Even if they > > don't have the authority to do it (that just makes it ineffective > > censorship). > > Actually, the developer is choosing to have Debian distribute a package, and > others are trying to stop Debian from distributing the package. Word games. Censorship is when a citizen of one body chooses to have that body distribute something (by being a citizen and distributing it), and another citizen tries to stop them. That body could be a country or it could be Debian. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activity monitor
On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 12:44:36PM +1100, Ben Burton wrote: > > > > It has been proven endless times that once you start doing this, you > > > > can't stop. For any package, there is going to be some minority group > > > > that is offended by it. > > > > > > Sounds to me like your problem is not so much with the objection, but with > > > its expected implementation. > > > > There's only one way this ever goes. Any student of history should be > > familiar with how this plays out. > > shrug. At least in .au we have some legislation to protect minority > groups but we're not living in a totalitarian PC clampdown. Sounds irrelevant. There's a big difference between 'protect minority groups' (from what?) and 'compel everybody to behave in a manner approved of by minority groups'. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Sacred Cows [was: Re: Debian's status as a legal entity and how it could effect a potential defense.]
On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 02:16:58AM -0500, William Ballard wrote: > On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 10:17:29PM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > > Would you please stop asserting that I'm out to FUD you? Given my > > history I would hope that you could take for granted that I want what's > > best for the project. > > I love how Debian has no sacred cows. It's one of the reasons I > stuck around. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and some > people to be more equal than others. > > Everybody has their moments :-) You have to read the above in the context that Bruce's "history" is comprised of the immortal words "Fuck you all" and the deletion of our mailing list archives. Then it makes more sense. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian's status as a legal entity and how it could effect a potential defense.
On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 10:38:51PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote: > Ron Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > That's true. Debian doesn't *have* to be mirrored *anywhere*. > > We do well to listen to what mirrors say, and what their concerns > are. But we do not do well to guess at what they might say, on the > basis of half-understood and unsupported claims about what their own > internal policies are. And throw this data point in: this university has apparently been distributing purity for a very long time. As usual, this policy is not seriously applied. It's there to cover the University in the case of a lawsuit, and to allow them to selectively apply it to people they want to get rid of (just about anybody can be effectively accused of violating the policy; it's almost impossible to go through the day without doing so). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Debian's status as a legal entity and how it could effect a potential defense.
Go away and don't come back until you have read the mailing list code of conduct. I do not need a second copy of this entire sodding thread. On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 09:01:48PM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > Is Debian a legal entity? The answer is unquestionably yes. Where do you get these ideas? Debian is unquestionably not a legal entity. > An unincorporated association is what your organization is until you go > through a legal process to change it into something else. It is a legal > entity. It can sue and be sued, and its members can be criminally > prosecuted in connection with it. It passes most of its liability on to > the people associated with it. We don't have any hope of proving that > Debian is not an organization. Guilt by association went out with the middle ages, along with witch hunts. These days you cannot be held responsible for events beyond your control. And Debian was carefully built in a manner that prevents any question of one developer controlling another. This is precisely what we want and it's also precisely what we have. Debian is a loose aggregation of individuals who are individually responsible for their own actions. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor
On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 09:06:00PM -0600, Ron Johnson wrote: > > > > What is actually happening here is that one individual Debian > > > > developer is choosing to distribute a given package, and some other > > > > developers are trying to stop them. That's censorship. Even if they > > > > don't have the authority to do it (that just makes it ineffective > > > > censorship). > > > > > > Actually, the developer is choosing to have Debian distribute a package, > > > and > > > others are trying to stop Debian from distributing the package. > > > > Word games. Censorship is when a citizen of one body chooses to have > > that body distribute something (by being a citizen and distributing > > it), and another citizen tries to stop them. > > Gah! Book publishers do not publish every manuscript that is sent > to them. Movie studios do not fund every screenplay sent to them. > Libraries, as has been mentioned before, don't buy every book. You seem to be suggesting that any case where an organisation doesn't publish something is not censorship. That's obviously wrong, because some of them *are* censorship. > Such choices are made *all the time*. It's the difference between > "editing" and "censoring". The difference being that editing is a choice made by the person doing the work, while censorship is a choice made by an otherwise unrelated person in the same organisation. Editing would be if the maintainer decided to remove the package. Censorship is when some other developer tries to force him. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activity monitor
On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 01:24:49PM +1100, Ben Burton wrote: > > > > shrug. At least in .au we have some legislation to protect minority > > > groups but we're not living in a totalitarian PC clampdown. > > > > Sounds irrelevant. There's a big difference between 'protect minority > > groups' (from what?) and 'compel everybody to behave in a manner > > approved of by minority groups'. > > The latter is often designed to achieve the former. > > So let me say then that we have some legislation in .au that in certain > contexts compels people to behave in a manner approved of by minority > groups, and yet we're not living in a totalitarian PC clampdown. Yet. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor
On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 09:25:31PM +0100, Andrea Bedini wrote: > Il giorno lun, 06-12-2004 alle 01:49 +0000, Andrew Suffield ha scritto: > > Word games. Censorship is when a citizen of one body chooses to have > > that body distribute something (by being a citizen and distributing > > it), and another citizen tries to stop them. > > This is not the case: one member of a community chooses to do something > on which community doesn't agree. So community decides to not follow his > member and *let him do what he wants by his own*. Debian should not do > everything a single developer wants to do; as a community we have to > find a general consensus on our policy. That's censorship. Know what you're advocating, and consider its implications. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#283578: ITP: hot-babe -- erotic graphical system activitymonitor
On Mon, Dec 06, 2004 at 04:51:59AM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > > Editing would be if the maintainer decided to remove the > > package. Censorship is when some other developer tries to force him. > > If an ftp-master in the course of "doing the work" of processing NEW rejects > a package, or a member of the release team in the course of "doing the work" > of preparing the next stable release excludes a package from consideration, > is this editing, or is it censorship? All of those things could be either. It is precisely because the boundaries are not clear that we must stay away from them. That's the reason why everybody who starts down the path of censorship ends up in the same place. > It's extremely frustrating to see so many words spent on the notion of > "censorship" here. At the end of the day, Debian, *as an organization*, > has the right (and responsibility) to decide what it publishes on behalf of > its member developers, and doing so is *not* *censorship*. It can be. In the proposed scenario it would be. > And it's no wonder that Debian is slow to release when people are criticized > on public lists for showing an interest in the contents and quality of > packages that aren't theirs; for daring to ask the question, "is this > something that Debian needs?" Nobody in this thread has seriously asked that question. > This discussion shouldn't be about censorship, or other forms of coercion; Aye, but it is, and that line of thinking needs to be stopped while we still can. Frankly the package is irrelevant to this discussion, and the subject line is misleading. > And contrary to much of > the rhetoric in this thread, it is possible to think a package like hot-babe > is a bad idea without wanting to be set up as a censor for all ideas they > disagree with. However, it's extremely unlikely that it is possible to ban it for that reason without going down that path. There's a significant difference between thinking something is a bad idea and trying to stop it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: package rejection
On Tue, Dec 07, 2004 at 10:10:19AM +1100, Brian May wrote:
> I think it would be better to create a distribution of Debian, where
> applicable, that meets the legal requirements of the given country.
>
> That way if you do really want to distribute Debian where there are
> laws against XYZ, you can distribute a subset of Debian that doesn't
> {do,use,require,consume,kill,display,say,etc} XYZ.
> This also raises lots of issues, like how to do it with minimum fuss
> and who is legally responsible (if anybody) if mistakes occur.
Also, in much of the civilised world, once you start doing this you
suddenly acquire a legal responsibility to do it *right*, which you
wouldn't have had if you hadn't tried to do it.
Censorship laws are strange like that.
[Not likely to be a problem for us as a project, but it might be for
people who do this sort of thing. Commercial publishers run into this
problem all the time and often decide it's safer not to bother]
--
.''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
: :' : http://www.debian.org/ |
`. `' |
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signature.asc
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Re: Linux Core Consortium
On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 01:42:57PM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote: > Adrian von Bidder dijo [Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 04:38:10PM +0100]: > > > we don't exactly have a strong history of being able to pull off > > > timely releases > > > > Did Debian even try? > > > > I didn't follow the woody release too closely, being a Debian newbie at the > > time, so I don't know. But - this was my impression - from the start, > > sarge was prepared with the 'we release when we're ready' idea, which makes > > everybody feel that they have more than enough time. > > Yes, it did. Debian has long tried to shorten the release cycles, > without any success. That's the reason why Testing was introduced > (after Slink, IIRC). I got involved in Debian close to the Woody > release. We were quite optimist that Sarge would release in ~1 year Who was? Everybody with any sense knew that it wasn't going to happen. > There are many proposals to make Etch and future releases come out > sooner, please check them at > http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?ReleaseProposals Every single one of these falls into one of these four groups: (a) Give up (and maybe do something else entirely, like making unstable releases) (b) Split Debian into pieces, which we haven't tried before but we know won't make the pieces any easier to release (and what's the use of releasing a 'core' chunk early before there are any applications to run on it?) (c) Stuff that we've tried before and abandoned (like freezing unstable) (d) Stuff that isn't related to making releases faster -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Pre-Depends on emacs21? Re: cedet-common: breaks other packages in batch mode
On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 11:25:49AM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > Bug #270388 regards the cedet-common package breaking emacs -batch. A > proposed fix in the bug report is for cedet-common to Pre-Depend on emacs21 > | emacsen instead of depending on it. > > An NMU based on this proposed fix has already been uploaded to the DELAYED > queue by Henning Glawe without first discussing on debian-devel as required > by policy. I'm therefore posting this message to get a reasonable set of > eyeballs on this issue. > > For my part, I think a Pre-Depends here is crude and inappropriate, as other > comments in the log suggest to me that this is a remediable bug in > cedet-common's startup code; but I haven't dug into it far enough to say for > sure. That seems like an accurate description. No Pre-Depends needed here, fix the damn bug instead. Should be a trivial addition of a conditional somewhere. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: LCC and blobs
On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 12:15:31PM +, Matthew Garrett wrote: > Blars Blarson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > >>How does moving firmware from the disk to the hardware (therefore making > >>it harder to modify and more expensive) further the cause of free > >>software? > > > > It makes it covered by the hardware manufacturers warentee. If it is > > faulty, you can return it for repair or refund. > > Under UK law, I have the same rights with faulty software. Do other > jurisdictions actually treat software and hardware differently in this > respect? UK law is abnormal in that we blast through those 'ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY' clauses in software licenses with the Sale of Goods act. In most places those hold (because the 'licensed, not sold' thing lets them specify almost arbitrary terms). We're considered unusually socialist for holding people responsible for selling goods as advertised (rather than considering it 'reasonable' to sell a box containing a piece of paper that says it's not their fault if the software doesn't work, or indeed completely fails to be inside the expensive box when you open it). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Why firmware generally won't be Free Software
On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 08:14:40AM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > If we ask for the embedded programming in the devices to be open as > well, we are essentially asking for the hardware design below the bus > level to be opened. This is fine for a restricted subset of vendors that > are designing explicitly for Open Source such as GNURadio and OpenCores. > But most manufacturers won't go for it. This is the argument that says free software is impossible. It's been demonstrated to be bullshit. Come on, this argument is from the 1980s, and your side *lost* in the real world. Free software is here. We'll do it again if we have to. They can open their specifications or we'll fucking implement around them and eventually drive them out of the market. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: If you really want Free firmware...
On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 11:07:35AM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > It will take fund-raising to do it. Bullshit. There goes that "free software is impossible" argument again. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: If you really want Free firmware...
On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 11:21:54AM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > My surmise is that we'd need an effort like that, raising $250K, to > design and go to full-custom fabrication of an FPLA with fully-open > design. Mine is that one can get useful things done without having to spend ridiculous amounts of money, or even any money at all. Yours is that you can't. Debian proves you wrong every day. There is absolutely no reason why any money is needed for this. Design the damn thing. Somebody will want to produce it. Manufacturing companies would *leap* at the opportunity to make widely desireable chips with zero royalty costs. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: If you really want Free firmware...
On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 03:57:19PM -0500, Brendan wrote: > On Monday 13 December 2004 14:50, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 11:21:54AM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > > > My surmise is that we'd need an effort like that, raising $250K, to > > > design and go to full-custom fabrication of an FPLA with fully-open > > > design. > > > > Mine is that one can get useful things done without having to spend > > ridiculous amounts of money, or even any money at all. Yours is that > > you can't. Debian proves you wrong every day. > > What does that have to do with hardware, please? > I mean, it's a lovely statement and all, but it's wrong. Right back at you. > > There is absolutely no reason why any money is needed for this. Design > > the damn thing. Somebody will want to produce it. Manufacturing > > companies would *leap* at the opportunity to make widely desireable > > chips with zero royalty costs. > > "Somebody" and "widely desirable". > > Ok, do it and report back, soldier. I don't care about it. It's the people who want it done badly enough to whine about it on public mailing lists who should go do it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: If you really want Free firmware...
On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 08:43:37AM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote: > On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 07:50:02PM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 11:21:54AM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > > > My surmise is that we'd need an effort like that, raising $250K, to > > > design and go to full-custom fabrication of an FPLA with fully-open > > > design. > > > > Mine is that one can get useful things done without having to spend > > ridiculous amounts of money, or even any money at all. Yours is that > > you can't. Debian proves you wrong every day. > > > > There is absolutely no reason why any money is needed for this. Design > > the damn thing. Somebody will want to produce it. Manufacturing > > companies would *leap* at the opportunity to make widely desireable > > chips with zero royalty costs. > > Manufacturing an ASIC involves NRE (non-recurring engineering) costs > of hundreds of thousands to millions per revision. A manufacturing > company is going to need to see a pretty good market before they > invest that in an open design. Manufacturing an operating system involves NRE costs of hundreds of thousands to millions per revision. Oh, wait. Actually, that's just *one* way of doing it. And yet you're quoting Redmond propaganda as if it were the only truth. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: If you really want Free firmware...
On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 02:13:53PM -0600, Kenneth Pronovici wrote: > On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 07:50:02PM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 11:21:54AM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote: > > > My surmise is that we'd need an effort like that, raising $250K, to > > > design and go to full-custom fabrication of an FPLA with fully-open > > > design. > > > > Mine is that one can get useful things done without having to spend > > ridiculous amounts of money, or even any money at all. Yours is that > > you can't. Debian proves you wrong every day. > > > > There is absolutely no reason why any money is needed for this. Design > > the damn thing. Somebody will want to produce it. Manufacturing > > companies would *leap* at the opportunity to make widely desireable > > chips with zero royalty costs. > > I think what you're forgetting (or at least ignoring) is that designing > hardware is not exactly like designing software. The process is > similar, yes, but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. At the > least, this is because testing your hardware "implementation" is not > "free" (as in beer). Any commercial software company will tell you exactly the same thing about software: testing is not free. We're *still* here. Consider why this works (without resorting to things which are obviously not true, like "current hardware doesn't ship with (many) known bugs", or "proprietary software is more reliable"). > I'm not trying to be pessimistic here, just realistic. I think that you > should be careful not to underestimate these fairly significant > differences between hardware and software. I think you're "underestimating" the difficulty of creating software. The difference is merely that you happen to be familiar with a more effective way to do it. Your point is quite amusing because historically any commercial organisation would have told you the exact opposite: Software is far more expensive to produce than hardware, by several orders of magnitude. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: If you really want Free firmware...
On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 08:57:20PM -0600, Kenneth Pronovici wrote: > And no, I can't confirm or refute the numbers, which is why *I* didn't > comment on whether they were realistic. You might want to try that > sometime. I cannot figure out what mail you were reading. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: If you really want Free firmware...
On Mon, Dec 13, 2004 at 09:20:53PM -0600, Kenneth Pronovici wrote: > > > I think what you're forgetting (or at least ignoring) is that designing > > > hardware is not exactly like designing software. The process is > > > similar, yes, but it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. At the > > > least, this is because testing your hardware "implementation" is not > > > "free" (as in beer). > > > > Any commercial software company will tell you exactly the same thing > > about software: testing is not free. We're *still* here. Consider why > > this works (without resorting to things which are obviously not true, > > like "current hardware doesn't ship with (many) known bugs", or > > "proprietary software is more reliable"). > > The difference is that software testing is often "free" in a capital > sense. I can volunteer my time to test or write open source software, > and there is very little capital expense associated with it (my cable > modem, my electricity, my PC, etc., much of which has other uses in my > household). The commercial software companies use volunteers like this too, even on pure-proprietary stuff, and it's not what they're talking about when they say testing is expensive. > Testing hardware of this sort requires actually manufacturing it (which > is a capital expense) and requires various pieces of test equipment (the > purchase of which would also be a capital expense). One way or another, > someone will have to bear these expenses. And they say that about software too. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: If you really want Free firmware...
On Tue, Dec 14, 2004 at 11:27:45AM -0600, Kenneth Pronovici wrote: > Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Hamish said, "Manufacturing an ASIC involves NRE...of hundreds of > thousands to millions per revision..." > > Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > You said, "Manufacturing an operating system involves NRE costs of > hundreds of thousands to millions per revision... you're quoting Redmond > propoganda..." [This implied that Hamish's numbers were not valid.] > > Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > (This is the message you just replied to) > I said, "Do you have any actual hardware design experience to draw on > here...", in reply to your implication about Hamish's numbers. > > Clear now? Ah, you misinterpreted my point in quite an impressive way. Valid numbers or not, his statement was of the form "Here is how we do it, and our way is the only way in which it is possible to do it". And we've heard that one before. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Are mails sent to xxxx buildd.debian.org sent to /dev/null ?
On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 04:59:15PM -0600, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote: > As it stands, 4 downloads for s390 appear somewhat disproportionate to > 1,285,422 for i386. s390 is a little special, because it's neither a desktop nor a server architecture, but rather a mainframe one. One software installation can service many thousands of users; these are the things IBM was talking about when they thought they would only sell five of them. So it will always be disproportionately low by this measure. Exactly how far different it is from the rest is difficult to tell. The other architectures don't have that excuse. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
For people more knowledgeable about buildds...
Hi, Is there a webpage that shows the current queue of packages in Needs-Build state? igloo's pages are great, but they only let you know the position in the queue of a package, not what's before or after it (out of curiosity). Also, what is involved with putting a package back into the Needs-Build state (i.e. requeueing it)? With complaints about the lack of response/response times from emails to [EMAIL PROTECTED], I was just wondering if it was feasible to have an email gateway like db.debian.org has for rescheduling failed builds? I presume the majority of emails sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED] are requests for requeuing? regards Andrew -- linux.conf.au 2005 - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - Birthplace of Tux April 18th to 23rd - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - LINUX Canberra, Australia - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ -Get bitten! signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: New stable version after Sarge
On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 04:25:00PM +0100, Martin Schulze wrote: > Paul van der Vlis wrote: > > >At least that's been the case including sarge. Hence, such > > >a sentence would not mean anything. > > > > > >>I can understand something like "Debian releases when it's ready", but > > >>many people have to work together. Maybe it's better to say: "a package > > >>releases when it's ready, but the deadline for the next Debian release > > >>is a fixed date". > > > > > >What if the installer is broken at that time? > > > > Normally a broken installer does not come into testing (ehm, I don't > > know for sure the installer is a normal package). > > During the preparation of sarge there was a long time where the > installer didn't work as it should have. Go read the archives. That said, this (rather large) blocker shouldn't be the issue it has been for this release for the next one. The two biggest blockers to releasing any time soon have been the installer and the security infrastructure. I'm actually not abreast of what the issue is with the security infrastructure, so I don't know if it's likely to be a blocker all over again come etch release time. I'd like to think it's going to easier to release etch sooner. regards Andrew -- linux.conf.au 2005 - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - Birthplace of Tux April 18th to 23rd - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - LINUX Canberra, Australia - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ -Get bitten! signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: RunDinstallHourly
On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 10:16:27AM -0800, Ken Bloom wrote: > http://wiki.debian.net/?RunDinstallHourly (part of the ReleaseProposals > topic on wiki.debian.net) discusses the concept of speeding up the release > process by running dinstall hourly instead of once per day. This seems (to > my amateur eyes) like a technically simple change to make even before we > release Sarge (barring any unforseen consequences). Would it be possible > to start testing this proposal out now by increasing the frequency of > dinstall, perhaps to once every 6 hours until release? > Wouldn't this have a flow on effect on our mirrors (or is the mirror pulse independent of the dinstall run)? Either way, if the mirror pulse only happens once a day, running dinstall more than once is going to be largely ineffective for most users isn't it? regards Andrew -- linux.conf.au 2005 - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - Birthplace of Tux April 18th to 23rd - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - LINUX Canberra, Australia - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ -Get bitten! signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Ignoring the truth or Hiding problems?
On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 03:12:14PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote: > Le mercredi 05 janvier 2005 à 07:39 -0500, Glenn Maynard a écrit : > > While you're correct--Ingo should be using list-reply, not group-reply--it's > > also somewhat dubious to complain about receiving CC's on list mail when you > > havn't set up your MFT header to say you don't want them, list policy or no. > > (In other words, if he actually cares enough to complain about it, he should > > be able to set up your headers to say what he wants, too. It's a lot more > > time-effective, mail for mail, than trying to teach people how to use their > > MUA.) > > Mail-Followup-To is not part of any of the standards defining e-mail > protocols. Which just goes to show how useless and irrelevant these purported "standards" are. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: RunDinstallHourly
On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 02:45:12PM -0800, Ken Bloom wrote: > On Wed, 05 Jan 2005 09:36:11 +1100, Andrew Pollock wrote: > > > On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 10:16:27AM -0800, Ken Bloom wrote: > >> http://wiki.debian.net/?RunDinstallHourly (part of the ReleaseProposals > >> topic on wiki.debian.net) discusses the concept of speeding up the > >> release process by running dinstall hourly instead of once per day. This > >> seems (to my amateur eyes) like a technically simple change to make even > >> before we release Sarge (barring any unforseen consequences). Would it > >> be possible to start testing this proposal out now by increasing the > >> frequency of dinstall, perhaps to once every 6 hours until release? > >> > >> > > Wouldn't this have a flow on effect on our mirrors (or is the mirror pulse > > independent of the dinstall run)? Either way, if the mirror pulse only > > happens once a day, running dinstall more than once is going to be largely > > ineffective for most users isn't it? > > Part of this proposal would be speed up the mirror pulse to occur as > frequently as dinstall. > Which our mirrors may or may not be ecstatic about... If they all get cross with us because of it, we're a bit worse off... regards Andrew -- linux.conf.au 2005 - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - Birthplace of Tux April 18th to 23rd - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ - LINUX Canberra, Australia - http://lca2005.linux.org.au/ -Get bitten!
Re: MPEG in general Was: Is anyone packaging `lame' ?
On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 11:32:41AM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote: > > Is only MPEG Layer III patent encumbered ? > > How about the other MPEG stuff ? > > I find it hard to believe that it is all patent-free. > > It's all encumbered with patents. Encoders *and* decoders. Encoders only, not decoders. Decoders for anything probably cannot be patented. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: MPEG in general Was: Is anyone packaging `lame' ?
On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 01:56:43PM +0100, Bartosz Fenski aka fEnIo wrote: > On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 12:06:53PM +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > > > Is only MPEG Layer III patent encumbered ? > > > > How about the other MPEG stuff ? > > > > I find it hard to believe that it is all patent-free. > > > > > > It's all encumbered with patents. Encoders *and* decoders. > > > > Encoders only, not decoders. Decoders for anything probably cannot be > > patented. > > Really? AFAIR every producent of mobile mp3 player had to pay patent > grants, to be able to distribute his device. They'll only sell you licenses to the encoder patents if you pay them for your decoders as well. That's not the same thing. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: MPEG in general Was: Is anyone packaging `lame' ?
On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 01:01:53PM +, Will Newton wrote: > On Saturday 08 Jan 2005 12:56, Bartosz Fenski aka fEnIo wrote: > > > > > It's all encumbered with patents. Encoders *and* decoders. > > > > > > Encoders only, not decoders. Decoders for anything probably cannot be > > > patented. > > > > Really? AFAIR every producent of mobile mp3 player had to pay patent > > grants, to be able to distribute his device. > > And every set top box manufacturer pays for their MPEG-2 (or MPEG-4) > licenses. Those are the patents for the transport mechanisms. Still not the decoders. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: MPEG in general Was: Is anyone packaging `lame' ?
On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 04:03:37PM +, Will Newton wrote: > On Saturday 08 Jan 2005 15:46, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > > > And every set top box manufacturer pays for their MPEG-2 (or MPEG-4) > > > licenses. > > > > Those are the patents for the transport mechanisms. Still not the decoders. > > Sigh. You seem to have a talent for picking subjects for argument that you > know nothing about. Your talent appears to be argumentum ad hominem... > Go study the licensing scheme and patent portfolio for > MPEG-2 and tell me how you can get around the motion compensation and > prediction patents for example[1] or the alternate scan patents, By not encoding anything. These are patents on methods of encoding. (They also appear to have patents on various postprocess filtering methods, mostly in hardware; presumably the set-top box manufacturers license and use these as well). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Bug#293010: ITP: nautilus-sendto -- integrates Evolution and Gaim into the Nautilus file manager
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Andrew Lau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
* Package name: nautilus-sendto
Version : 0.2-1
Upstream Author : Roberto Majadas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
* URL : http://www.es.gnome.org/~telemaco/
* License : GPL
Description : integrates Evolution and Gaim into the Nautilus file manager
From the website (i.e. not the final package description)
Features:
# Nautilus context menu component ("Send To...") .
# A dialog for insert the email acount or IM account which you want to
# send the file/files .
* Contact with evolution-data-server and get the email accounts .
* Contact with gaim (nautilus gaim plugin) and get the IM acccounts
* You can send files packaged in varios formats
# Plugin Support. Now evolution and gaim support are
# nautilus-sendto-plugins
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.10-1-k7
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
--
-------
Andrew "Netsnipe" Lau <http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~alau/>
Debian GNU/Linux Maintainer & UNSW Computing Students' Society President
-
"Nobody expects the Debian Inquisition!
Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency!"
---
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
Re: Bug#293167: ITP: request-tracker3.4 -- Extensible trouble-ticket tracking system
[Please Cc me on replies to this thread] mpalmer wrote: > On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 06:27:30PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote: > > Request Tracker is a development framework for trouble ticket systems. > > Users are encouraged to add new code to its (Perl) packages, and > > there's an overlay mechanism to support this. > > > > Unfortunately, this makes updates non-trivial, at least sometimes. > > So you do a bit of testing before madly apt-get dist-upgrading your > production servers. What a concept. Think of RT as being like a library bundled with its -dev package. You don't go replacing libraries with versions of a higher soname when you know most of your users have linked specifically to the version you distributed. Likewise, we're not about to junk RT 3.0 till 3.4 has proved stable for long enough that most of our users have ported all their scripts to the new RT 3.4 APIs. "Our priorities are our users ..." right? That said, we'll scrap the 3.2 packages when 3.4 get into sid; they've never been in a stable distribution and they haven't been in sid for that long. -- Andrew Stribblehill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Systems programmer, IT Service, University of Durham, England -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: execturing libc
On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 11:27:32PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 06:17:01PM +1100, Paul Hampson wrote: > > > It still lets you execute files that don't have the executable flag > > > set like libc. It's a different bug but it's still there. > > > Is that a bug? I can run -x perl scripts with perl so > > why not -x ELF scripts with /lib/ld-linux.so.2 > > > What stops me taking a copy of the binary, making it +x and running > > that anyway? So I don't see any security concern... > > Not having write access to any media that's not marked noexec? > > But I agree that the security benefits are trivial on a system where > users have access to perl. Or bash, that's enough to do it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: "The Debian exim 4 packages suck badly" on exim-users@exim.org
On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 09:04:59PM -0600, Donald J Bindner wrote: > When you compile a kernel and check the help on a module, you'll > never find "If unsure, don't say Y." Something to think about... That's because the string is "If unsure, say N". [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/src/linux-2.6.10$ grep unsure * -r | grep Kconfig | egrep -c "say '?Y" 148 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/usr/src/linux-2.6.10$ grep unsure * -r | grep Kconfig | egrep -c "say '?N" 366 So much for that theory. Testing it took no more than a couple of minutes; you could have done that yourself and saved us all the time of a couple of mails. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: [debian-devel] Re: FW: A Call to Action in OASIS
On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 02:53:49PM +, Magos?nyi ?rp?d wrote: > A levelez?m azt hiszi, hogy Martin Michlmayr - Debian Project Leader a > következ?eket írta: > > * Jaldhar H. Vyas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-02-23 09:18]: > > > > A Call to Action in OASIS > > > Debian has a representative in OASIS doesn't it? > > > > Yes (Mark Johnson); I already mailed him to ask for his comments. > > I would be happy if Debian would do everything possible against > standards covered by patents. > > It is our essential interest. I would not, and it isn't. There is a wide variety of things possible to do against standards covered by patents that would not be a good idea, including but not limited to writing licenses that are non-free out of a misguided attempt to prohibit them. This isn't an academic concern, it's a real problem that we've been facing for quite some time now. Action based on rational evaluation of the consequences *only*, please. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Updating config files: permissions!?
On Sat, Feb 26, 2005 at 12:12:31AM +0100, Torsten Landschoff wrote: > During upgrades the slapd package (for example) has to do some > adjustments on config files (it asks the user for permission of course). > > Problem: How do I make sure the new config files have the same > permissions!? Currently I do > > chmod --reference=OLD NEW > chown --reference=OLD NEW > mv NEW OLD > > but this will break with ACLs. And what happens with SELinux!? Can't > find anything in debian-policy about it, shouldn't we define that > handling? You can't solve this problem atomically. However, you can do this: mv OLD TMP cat NEW > TMP mv TMP OLD rm NEW Which is almost as good. The point being that rather than create a new file, you truncate the old one and replace its contents (but avoid ever leaving a half-populated file in place; no file is better than a mangled file). -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: dehs will stop
On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 01:35:40AM -0300, Lucas Wall wrote: > Now that you have this information, do you think dehs could be useful? > Do others think something like dehs could be useful? As a general tool? Maybe, but how is it better than uscan, which it duplicates? As a website? No, not really. It's slow and doesn't present any views on the information that are particularly useful and it's completely immune to shell scripting. A web interface would appear to be the wrong way to do this. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: self-depending packages
On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 12:06:06PM +0100, Steinar H. Gunderson wrote: > On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 11:58:14AM +0100, Marc Haber wrote: > > Does it? The last time I was faced with that issue, the starting point > > chosen was random and unpredictable. > > It does. (I've hacked the code.) Unfortunately apt breaks the code. If you use dpkg directly it'll work. If you use apt it'll pick a random and unpredictable starting point. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: self-depending packages
On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 09:49:41PM +0200, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote: > On 20050228T164806+0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > Unfortunately apt breaks the code. If you use dpkg directly it'll > > work. If you use apt it'll pick a random and unpredictable starting > > point. > > Doesn't apt usually unpack all packages first and then configure them in > one run, so that shouldn't matter? dpkg does the same thing -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Info and statistics about the project
On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 02:54:09PM -0400, Maykel Moya wrote: > Don't know whether the appropiate list for this post should be > debian-users or this. > > March 25, a Congress of Free Software will take place at UCI, here in > Cuba. I'd been preparing myself to give a talk about the Debian Project. > > Have found tons of info disgregated across the net. But, particularily, > I'm looking for some place where I can grab objetive statistics about > the project. > > If you know about such a site, please let me know. > > Thanks in advance and forgive me If I should begin asking for this in > debian-users. > Possibly debian-project is a better list to ask. regards Andrew -- linux.conf.au 2005 - http://linux.conf.au/ - Birthplace of Tux April 18th to 23rd - http://linux.conf.au/ - LINUX Canberra, Australia - http://linux.conf.au/ -Get bitten! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Bug#298195: ITP: tinywm -- Ridiculously tiny window manager
On Sun, Mar 06, 2005 at 01:17:50AM +0900, Nobuhiro Iwamatsu wrote: > Package: wnpp > Severity: wishlist > Owner: Nobuhiro Iwamatsu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > > * Package name: tinywm > Version : 1.2.0 > Upstream Author : Nick Welch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > * URL : http://incise.org/ > * License : fair license That's not a free license. In fact, it's about as non-free as you can get, since it's essentially "all rights reserved"; there's no permission to modify or redistribute at all. We can't distribute this, even in non-free. Here's the text: Use of the works is permitted provided that this instrument is retained with the works, so that any entity that uses the works is notified of this instrument. DISCLAIMER: THE WORKS ARE WITHOUT WARRANTY. Usual example of why random people should not be writing licenses. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Not every package should enter Debian (was: Re: Who cares about NEW when there are bigger issues? (was Re: Is NEW processing on hold? (was: Question for candidate Towns)))
On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 07:42:58PM +0100, Adrian von Bidder wrote: > IMHO, Debian has a serious double-problem here and needs to attack it. > ftp-masters should, as I understand the role, be a purely administrative > function: keep the archive running. No policy decisions should be made by > ftp-masters. > > In that light, fully automatic NEW processing will not hurt at all (I agree > that a delay of a few days is sensible to give us time to react to the > worst problem cases.) Unfortunately reality isn't so simple. In practice, the ftp-masters have also become the review point for new packages. We *need* new packages reviewing just to filter out some of the worst of the stupid from the archive; frankly we need more than just new packages reviewing. However, splitting that task out would probably be a good idea. > Ok, that's the easy technical bit that gets rid of manual NEW processing > alltogether. Now, the second question: How do we tell what should be > included in Debian and what not? > > There is no obvious answer. So the project has to decide on some arbitrary > standards - but I think it has been proven that decisions on a case by case > basis does not work - the pr0n debate comes up regularly, and as soon as > that's started somebody drags religion and politics into it and we have a > 300-mails thread. Well, that's mostly because religion and politics are the only reasons people ever object to 'pr0n' in the first place :P But since those would exclude so much of the archive already, they really can't be allowed as criteria. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
d-i has 99% support for filesystem labels (was: Re: Serious kernel problems on new i386 hardware)
On Fri, Mar 11, 2005 at 01:20:00PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote: > On Fri, 11 Mar 2005, Miros/law Baran wrote: > > >>it worked. I really regard this problem as serious because it > >>probably leaves people with SATA hardware with an unbootable system > >>after kernel-image updates, because the kernel image packages just > >>reinsert "root=/dev/hda?" into grub's menu.lst. Any idea how to > >>solve this problem? > > > >...by using partition labels in fstab? > Sorry, I do not know anything about partition labels but if this is > the solution it should be done in the installer and if this works in > Grub menu.lst this should be done here as well. > I gave some of the relevant people in the d-i team an education on the benefits of filesystem labels, to to the point where partman will create filesystems with a label, however I didn't manage to convince them to mount by the label in /etc/fstab regards Andrew -- linux.conf.au 2005 - http://linux.conf.au/ - Birthplace of Tux April 18th to 23rd - http://linux.conf.au/ - LINUX Canberra, Australia - http://linux.conf.au/ -Get bitten! -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: status of buildds?
On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 04:51:29PM +0100, Ingo Juergensmann wrote: > On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 04:14:22PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > > The step for you to become trusted is easy: apply for NM. A few years > > ago, I would've happily become your advocate. This /must/ mean you're > > trustworthy, even though you're not trusted yet. After all, trustworthy > > means 'deserving our trust' whereas trusted means 'getting our trust'. > > The two are very different. > > True... for some aspects... > > Either you trust me as a person or you trust some kind of software snippet, > aka gpg key. > To trust a person doesn't require any additional stuff. > And I don't see why you want to trust some kind of bytes on a disk more than > me as a person. Gah, what a load of gibberish. Trust is a 3-ary function of the form: trust :: Person -> Task -> Scenario -> Boolean And is defined as: trust p t s = (need_to_trust p t s) && (willing_to_trust p t s) It is not this, as you so absurdly claim: trust p t s = willing_to_trust p -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Licenses for DebConf6
On 11/14/05, Henning Makholm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I case you hadn't noticed, there was a major _difference_ in opionons > about how "software" was to be interpreted. The editorial > clarification in 2004-003 removed the confusion by avoiding the > ambiguous word "software" Unfortunately not. :-( The GR's author explained[1] that both the DFSG and the SC required clarifying, but that in the interests of simplicity the necessary changes would be dealt with in separate GRs. Thus, 2004-003 clarified only the SC. Until his follow-up GR amending the DFSG is proposed and passed, the ambiguity will remain. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/07/msg00435.html -- Andrew Saunders
Re: texlive-basic_2005-1_i386.changes REJECTED
On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:28, Thiemo Seufer wrote: > > FWIW, Debian package names prefer e.g. foo-en-uk-doc over > foo-documentation-ukenglish. This allows to filter documentation > packages by name (doc-* or *-doc), and following the standardized > ISO abbreviations also seems to be better than using yet another > scheme. > As a user, I much prefer foo + libfoo + foo-doc-en + foo-doc-fr rather than foo + libfoo + foo-en-doc + foo-fr-doc To me the hierarchy tree -- is much more natural than -- Cheers Andrew V. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: texlive-basic_2005-1_i386.changes REJECTED
On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 00:40, Thiemo Seufer wrote: > Andrew Vaughan wrote: > > On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 22:28, Thiemo Seufer wrote: > > > FWIW, Debian package names prefer e.g. foo-en-uk-doc over > > > foo-documentation-ukenglish. Can you provide a reference/stats to back this up. (on sarge) $ apt-cache search doc |grep -e'-doc-[a-z][a-z] ' |wc -l 12 $ apt-cache search doc |grep -e'-[a-z][a-z]-doc ' |wc -l 5 Examination of the first set shows 1 false positive: gmt-doc-ps - PostScript docs for the Generic Mapping Tools The other 11 translated docs Examination of the second set shows: adduser-ng-doc - Documentation for AddUser-NG users gnome-db-doc - frontend to the GDA architecture for GNOME -- documentation gri-ps-doc - PostScript manual for gri, a language for scientific graphics. libinti-gl-doc - GtkGLExt bindings for Inti - shared libraries proj-ps-doc - PostScript docs for cartographic projection filters and library Also look at the output to apt-cache search firefox |grep locale > > > This allows to filter documentation > > > packages by name (doc-* or *-doc), and following the standardized > > > ISO abbreviations also seems to be better than using yet another > > > scheme. > > > > > > To me the hierarchy tree > > -- > > is much more natural than > > -- > > It may look more natural, but it makes pattern matching harder > (e.g. python-docutils is a false positive for the naive approach). Probably any approach will yield false positives with naive search strings. However a few false positives don't matter in the typical use case of an interactive user searching for a package. > > > Thiemo Package naming should be about what makes most sense to the users. For me, that means increasing specialisation (of package) means tacking additional suffixes on the end of the packagename. package foo. add a doc package foo, foo-doc add translated docs foo, foo-doc-en, foo-doc-jp, foo-doc-fr etc. (Regardless of which way is considered better, this sort of thing should be standardised and defined in policy IMO). Why do you need to filter for *-doc packages anyway? If you are looking for say Japanese doc packages, filtering on say *-doc-jp is as easy as *-jp-doc isn't it? If you want all doc packages, regardless of language/formatting/encoding, then filtering for doc-* and *-doc is not enough anyway. In order to find *-doc-html, *-doc-ps you need you need to add *-doc-* anyway. (i) You are going to miss packages which don't contain doc in the name. (eg ada-reference-manual, apt-dpkg-ref, docbook-defguide). (ii) In order to find *-doc-html, *-doc-ps etc packages you need to add *-doc-* anyway. (eg exim4-doc-html, exim4-doc-info, r-doc-html, r-doc-pdf etc. Note that renaming these to say exim4-info-doc suggests naive users that this is the documentation for the exim4-info package.) (iii) So you need to search for doc-* *-doc and *-doc-* anyway. eg. apt-cache search doc | grep -e'^doc-\|-doc-\|-doc ' or apt-cache search doc | grep -e'^doc-\|-doc\b' Cheers Andrew V. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Stephen Frost MIA?
On Wed, Nov 30, 2005 at 09:25:31AM -0600, Graham Wilson wrote: > On Wed, Nov 30, 2005 at 08:48:44AM +0100, Martin Zobel-Helas wrote: > > how about sending this to Frontdesk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or MIA, > > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> instead of spamming debian-devel with that? > > Since when is a message that is on topic (or at least relevant) to > Debian development spam? Everything on -devel is spam these days, didn't you get the memo? -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Automatic closing of bugs
On Sat, 3 Dec 2005 03:03, Kevin B. McCarty wrote: > Simon Richter wrote: > > Matthew Palmer wrote: > >> Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is dig through the Perl > >> code in merkel:/org/bugs.debian.org/scripts and work out how to add > >> this functionality. > > > > You can use "package foo" as a command to control@ to tell it ignore > > everything that does not affect bugs against foo. I am unsure whether > > comma notation is allowed (so katie could generate "package bar,wnpp" > > at the beginning of bug closing emails). > > Yes, but for multi-binary source packages, the package changelog doesn't > specify which binary package the bug applies to, so katie would have no > way of knowing whether to say (e.g.) "package bar", "package libbar1", > or "package libbar-dev". I think this functionality would have to be > implemented on the BTS side. Logically package should work where is a source package. (Because its quite common to eg tag multiple bugs pending at the same time). Andrew V. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Debian and the desktop
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:08, Bill Allombert wrote: > On Tue, Dec 13, 2005 at 10:28:28AM +0100, Moritz Muehlenhoff wrote: > > This is beyond tasksel, but Bob User would profit immensely from generic > > menu entries. SuSE does this and I think it's very helpful. Most people > > don't care, which web browser they are using and if they're browsing > > through their application menu, they're confused by an entry called > > "Kopete", while an entry called "Instant Messaging Program" is a lot more > > helpful. So maybe menu should be extended to keep both forms, so that > > the generic form can be chosen during installation. Once Bob User has > > turned into Bob Hacker he can switch back to the detailed form. > > Hello Moritz, > > There are several people interested with this. As far as the Debian menu > system is concerned, I am no objection implementing this proposal. > > What is needed at this point is a draft policy defining what will be > the new layout and what will be the generic titles. > > However that will not affect the KDE and GNOME main menu, only the > Debian submenu. > On my sarge system KDE already does this. (Installed from sarge Installer beta 1 IIRC). Menu->Internet->Download Manager (KGet) FTP Client (KBear) etc Not all programs are properly classified eg. Mozilla, Thunderbird, most of the Development tools sub-menu, the Debian sub-menu. Andrew V. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: kernel 2.6.14
Hi On Thu, 15 Dec 2005 22:34, Richard Fojta wrote: > Hi, > I've recently try to install new kernel. Somethings go wrong and I cannot > found solution. There is some problem with configuration. It seems to me, > that this problem is not unique. Does anybody know how to solve ti? [This is probably more appropriate for -users, attempting to move there. Reply to set to debian-user@lists.debian.org, Richard Fojta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Bcc-ed to -devel] You don't give enough info be sure, but this sounds like it might be the same problem. On Thu, 15 Dec 2005 06:18, Andrei Popescu wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Today I upgraded my system. > > > > It wouldn’t boot up. Instead it give me this error: > > > > Waiting 2 seconds /sys/block/hda/dev to show up. > > > > /bin/cat:/sys/block/hda/dev: no such file or directory. > > > > Is this fixable or do I have to set up my complete system again? Hope > > not. > > > > Pascal. > > Here is what worked for me: > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/12/msg01408.html > http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2005/12/msg01406.html > > post your steps if you get stuck > > Andrei HTH Andrew V.
Re: congratulations to our ftp-master team
On 12/15/05, Thomas Bushnell BSG <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > If there is a serious risk that these people would so blatantly > disregard our constitution That certainly seems to be the case, judging from the discussion that followed Bdale's "Structural Evolution" Debconf5 talk[1] - here's a transcript of the relevant portion: : One of the concerns that we've seen crop up periodically over the years is that we can refactor the project leadership as much as we like but it's not going to do a lot of good if not everybody feels like they are part of the governed. And there are areas in the Debian Project that are vested with authority that predates the constitution. I've spoken with some of these people (and they've made postings over the years) - and they're not comfortable exactly with the idea of, say, the possibility of a madman DPL, for example. And I'm not sure that these same historical roles will be any more comfortable with a different thing. You know: "We've been doing this for ten years now. You can change the constitution, you can put a board in there, you can put a person in there... Do what you want, but in the end this work's still got to be done." There's no benefit to them in recognising... : So there're a couple of fundamental things that come to mind when we start talking about this. One is that I think organisational structure - good organisational structure - very rarely does anything to guarantee success, but if you get the wrong struture it really can impede progress and success. That's sort of one idea. And the other one is that - it's been my observation that, every time I personally have ended up in the situation where I've started to think I was indispensable (and believe me, it's happened at various times in my history) - when something finally forced me to realise that that wasn't true, things in general sort of picked up pace and moved better as a result. And so there is this sort of trade-off, I think, between motivating participation and how you actually sort of keep from getting stuck in a rut or something. So... I don't know that I have any more brilliant ideas than that. [1] http://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2005/debconf5/mpeg/2005-07-16/08-Structural_Evolution-Bdale_Garbee.mpeg -- Andrew Saunders
Re: Size matters. Debian binary package stats
On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 08:27:36PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote: > * Steinar H. Gunderson: > > > My comments are about the same as on IRC: > > > > - Disk space is cheap, bandwidth is cheap. > > Depends. Decent IP service costs a few EUR per gigabyte in most parts > of the world. I wish we could get it that cheap for my day job. What we have to pay to get useful bandwidth has more zeros in it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Size matters. Debian binary package stats
On Mon, Dec 19, 2005 at 09:56:27AM +0100, Olaf van der Spek wrote: > On 12/19/05, Andrew Suffield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 08:27:36PM +0100, Florian Weimer wrote: > > > * Steinar H. Gunderson: > > > > > > > My comments are about the same as on IRC: > > > > > > > > - Disk space is cheap, bandwidth is cheap. > > > > > > Depends. Decent IP service costs a few EUR per gigabyte in most parts > > > of the world. > > > > I wish we could get it that cheap for my day job. What we have to pay > > to get useful bandwidth has more zeros in it. > > Are you paying > 10 $/gb? Heck yes, you can't get it that cheap unless you have no SLA (or one of those insulting SLAs that come with residential service, claiming that it doesn't have to work at all). And you can't get that at all on a pipe of any significant size (unless you're big enough to work out a peering agreement). We pay per month though, not per byte. > Where is it that expensive? UK. As a general rule, UK bandwidth prices are roughly five to ten times those of equivalent service in other EU countries. Not that you can get equivalent service. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Thoughts on Debian quality, including automated testing
On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 12:23:32PM +0100, Thomas Hood wrote: > I would support requiring team maintainership because TM will be > beneficial in almost all cases and making it a requirement it cuts off a > lot of useless discussion. Cute theory, gaping hole. Making a group of people responsible for something, rather than a single person, means that they can all spend all their time passing the buck and hoping that one of the others takes care of it, with the result that nobody does. Debian is a great example of this problem in practice. Most of the more significant teams show this problem to one degree or another. Common places where it appears are ftp-master, debian-admin, and scud. You get a lot of people able to meddle with something but none of them responsible for actually seeing that it gets done - and so some of it just doesn't get done. The NEW queue used to get backed up all the time for exactly this reason. The problem went away when one person became responsible for processing it. Replacing teams with individuals usually works better, where it's actually possible. When it isn't, you probably need to break up the task more until it is. We would all be much worse off with the abolition of individual responsibility. If I were feeling in a conspiracy-theorist mood then I'd suggest that those who are promoting team maintainance are trying to gain power while evading responsibility. But frankly I think that's giving them too much credit. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: udev event completion order
On Thu, 22 Dec 2005 06:29, Darren Salt wrote: > I demand that Alexander E. Patrakov may or may not have written... > > > Kay Sievers wrote: > >> There is also the plan to do parallel device probing inside the kernel > >> some day, that will make the situation of relying on kernel names even > >> more fragile. > > > > Right, this means that the way of passing "root=/dev/hdc2" will no > > longer work because /dev/hdc will sometimes become /dev/hde. > That will also break scripts/apps that manipulate disks/partitions. This could easily result in some-one restoring a backup over the wrong disk. Andrew -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Thoughts on Debian quality, including automated testing
On Thu, 22 Dec 2005 04:32, David Nusinow wrote: > On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 05:32:21PM +0100, Thomas Hood wrote: > > This is not a fair characterization of what the introduction of > > a two-maintainer rule would be doing. No one should be insulted > > by general rule changes designed to make Debian work better. > > I think a two-maintainer rule is a bit artificial and perhaps the wrong > solution. Taking a cue from teams that work well in Debian (Gnome, d-i, > etc) indicates that somewhat larger teams with a common goal and a fairly > large set of packages under their umbrella will work in practice. This > provides the opportunity for autonomy (someone can take ownership of a > package within the team) but also a cohesiveness and a known set of > people to turn to when you're in need. > > It's pretty simple to found such a team too. All it takes is some > interested people and an alioth project. > > - David Nusinow I was about to suggest exactly that. Thanks David Andrew -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Thoughts on Debian quality, including automated testing
On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 11:17:43PM +0100, Thomas Hood wrote: > If the problem is lack of motivation, > and the chief motivator is a sense of responsibility, then you don't want > to diffuse that. Specifically motivation to do *this* task, rather than any of the others in the pile that need doing. People who maintain significant packages tend to be busy. Their reason for doing one thing over another will be primarily dependent on what they want to do, and what they feel they *should* do. > > We would all be much worse off with the abolition of individual > > responsibility. > > The constitution already abolished it -- at least, if you interpret > article 2.1 the way some people have. I consider 'individual responsibility' to be a matter of personal ethics, not enforced punishment. We do have a few morally bankrupt maintainers (or, non-maintainers). I think the majority of developers have some sense of responsibility, though. This belief is primarily founded on the fact that I don't think Debian could have survived this long at this size without it. > Maybe it would be useful to reinforce a sense of responsibility in Debian. You can't reinforce or enforce ethics - attempting to do so merely gives you obedience, or a herd mentality. And I don't think that a blame culture will accomplish anything. On the other hand, I think there might be some benefit to requiring that the Maintainer field must always denote one single Debian developer, who would be the "buck stops here" guy for that package. Not an applicant, not a mailing list, and not a group of people. I believe the tools have now advanced to the point where this is a practical option. In general you're always far better off forcing every *change* to a given component to go through a single individual. Large projects need a pumpking, because dogpiling creates lousy software. For Debian this would be cumbersome and unwieldy as a rule, but some high-importance tasks could benefit from it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Thoughts on Debian quality, including automated testing
On Thu, Dec 22, 2005 at 10:43:34AM +0100, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote: > On Thu, 2005-12-22 at 08:38 +0000, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > On the other hand, I think there might be some benefit to requiring > > that the Maintainer field must always denote one single Debian > > developer, who would be the "buck stops here" guy for that > > package. Not an applicant, not a mailing list, and not a group of > > people. > > This "not an applicant" thing is a bad idea. As you might know, the > NM-process is designed around the idea that someone has to prove they're > up to the task they want to do. That's why for packagers it's required > to have packaging activitity. Disallowing them to have the final > responsibility over a package disables you to evaluate whether they're > actually fit for this responsibility. Actually it doesn't, you could work it out something like this: The maintainer is a developer who is ultimately responsible for the package. The applicant does most of the work. One of the primary criteria for judging the applicant would be how much work the maintainer has to do - the question put to them would be of the form "Would you be comfortable with handing this package over to this person, after watching them work for N weeks?". The issues with the current system are that we end up with a lot of packages being non-maintained by failing applicants, and we get a lot of useless packages added to the archive just because an applicant needed to find something of their own. This scheme should fix the former and reduce the latter. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Thoughts on Debian quality, including automated testing
On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 02:31:19PM -0500, Benjamin Seidenberg wrote: > Andrew Suffield wrote: > > >On the other hand, I think there might be some benefit to requiring > >that the Maintainer field must always denote one single Debian > >developer, who would be the "buck stops here" guy for that > >package. Not an applicant, not a mailing list, and not a group of > >people. I believe the tools have now advanced to the point where this > >is a practical option. > > > >In general you're always far better off forcing every *change* to a > >given component to go through a single individual. Large projects need > >a pumpking, because dogpiling creates lousy software. For Debian this > >would be cumbersome and unwieldy as a rule, but some high-importance > >tasks could benefit from it. > > > > I think you have something here, but I think allowing an > applicant/mailing list in maintainer should be ok. > In the case of an applicant, if they're doine the work, they > both > deserve the credit I don't think we should be using the control file for this purpose. Particularly since it does not and never has included a list of the people who do most of the work on a given package. Consider samba - the 'maintainer' hasn't been heard from in ages, and nowhere in the control file are all the relevant people listed. The obvious place for this information would be the changelog - this is the current convention (again, see samba). > and should be the one to get all the messages that > the various debian infrastructures sends out (Archive scripts, BTS, > point of contact for security, etc). I *think* that the relevant infrastructure tools have now all been fixed so that you don't have to use the Maintainer field to accomplish this. > Instead, why not propose a Responsible-For: header for control that > lists a person inside the project who the buck stops with in the case of > an applicant or team maintained package? Because I don't see how it would be semantically different to the Maintainer field. The distinction between them is not apparent (what is Maintainer supposed to mean under this scheme?). And adding new fields is more work, so you don't do it without a good reason. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: stable aliases for CD drives
On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 05:55:03PM +0100, Adrian von Bidder wrote: > On Thursday 29 December 2005 14.45, Finn-Arne Johansen wrote: > > > Would it not be enough for apt if d-i created an fstab that linked > > /dev/hdX -> /media/cdrom ? > > Won't work because the problem at hand is exactly that /dev/hdX won't > necessarily be stable anymore. > > (and, once more, and much worse: network interfaces need a solution to the > same problem...) nameif, ifrename - really, this problem has been solved so many times that it's just not funny any more. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: No 2.6 kernels for 586 in Sarge and up
Hi
On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 02:55, Frans Pop wrote:
> On Monday 02 January 2006 16:40, Jérôme Warnier wrote:
> > I wonder why there is no 2.6 kernel package for 586 in Sarge while
> > there is for 2.4?
> > I can find 386-486-686 and k7, but no 586.
>
> Try linux-{source,image,headers}.
(on sarge, long lines trimmed)
$ apt-cache search 586 |grep image
kernel-image-2.4-586tsc - Linux kernel image for version 2.4 on Pentium-Clas
kernel-image-2.4.27-2-586tsc - Linux kernel image for version 2.4.27 on Pent
As Jérôme said, no 2.6 kernel compiled for 586 in sarge.
Andrew
Re: How to Increase Contributions from Volunteers
On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 11:52, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > Given the choice between having to double check work done by > potentially inexperienced folks, and ensuring that the package is > done by people who can do some of the double checking on their own, > and make less errors, I'd go for the latter every time. > > Debugging/proof reading other peoples work is always more > thankless, error prone, and often less thorough than following good > practices and minimizing errors the first time around. And that comes > with experience. > > Now, if you had a bunch of actual peers we were talking about, > then sure, more eyes do make for lighter work. But that is not what > we are discussing. We are talking about letting almost anybody > commit, and hope that the experienced person will catch all the > mistakes. I am not convinced that the mistake shall not grow in the > end product in this case. > Yes, but it's only by doing the work, either maintaining their own package, or submitting patches / directly committing to team maintained packages that people gain the skills they need to become DDs. Whats needed is a genuine team of 2-5 suitable new maintainer 'peers' co-maintaining half a dozen similar or related small packages (or one-two medium packages) plus one DD reviewing changes and sponsoring uploads every few weeks. Beginners can start off sending patches by mail, either to a mailing list, or to bug reports. (I do agree there should be some sort of control over commit access). If they don't know enough to contribute they will either learn, or drop out. (It worth pointing out that handling bug reports can be a useful contribution.) Once they have shown that they can contribute they can be given commit access. The one of the goals of this sort of team maintenance should be team members helping each other learn. The end result in terms of package quality should be less bugs than the current process of each individual new maintainer maintaining a couple of packages and a DD sponsoring the occasional upload. Yeah, there will probably will be more bugs committed to version control, but their will (hopefully) be more sets of eyes catching them. The apprentice maintainers don't need to maintain important packages. There are plenty of priority optional/extra packages, many with alternative packages with similar functionality. The DD does not have to do any more work per upload than they would under the current system. The main point is that this sort of team lowers the bar to entry. Someone who lacks the skills to create their own package can still contribute. And by contributing they can learn new skills. Just my 2 cents Andrew V. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [Listmaster] Seeking petsupermarket
On Tue, 3 Jan 2006 09:25, Cord Beermann wrote: > > Someone who is subscribed to d-devel forwards the mails to > petsupermarket. petsupermarket itself is not subscribed to any of our > mailinglists. > > If you have seen those c-r-responses outside of the debian-lists, or > in the last days on other lists than debian-devel, then this > information is maybe helpful to identify the address. > debian-user is also affected Andrew V. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: APT public key updates?
On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 07:38:37PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > In the third case, again the compromise is either detected, or it isn't. If > it's detected, we're revoking the key again; if it's *not* detected (and it > seems to me that anyone able to compromise the pgp key without also having > to compromise ftp-master is likely good enough to go undetected), then this > is a case where scheduled key rotations help us. There's also a secondary case where they help. Any PGP key can be cracked with sufficient outlay of computing power. Scheduled key rotations mean that this has a minimum *cost* requirement associated; it prevents mere time from being sufficient. If you work out the numbers carefully then you can effectively stop this attack for everybody who isn't rich enough to just hire away all the critical people and take control that way. Of course, the other requirement for this to work is that the new key not be generated until shortly before the old one is ready to expire. However, we don't have to do this annually; with a 2048-bit key, replacing every five years and generating the new key one year before the old one expires should be safe at present. That's a conservative estimate. To defend against ancillary attacks (like somebody grabbing a copy of the key from ftp-master) you need to know how probable they are, and reduce these figures accordingly. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Need for launchpad
On Fri, Jan 06, 2006 at 03:19:42PM -0500, Frans Jessop wrote: > Ubuntu's launchpad is amazing. Do you think it would be helpful if all > DD's worked through it on their projects? Wouldn't that keep things more > organized and efficient? Or perhaps Debian could build its own version of > launchpad which is better. Again, I think it would do a good job keeping > everything organized an efficient. The day when working on Debian requires the use of a web interface will be the day that I hunt down and painfully kill the person responsible for doing it. Removing the ability to manage things from the shell would not be more organised and efficient unless you're a complete fricking moron who can't operate a unix host. Which appears to be the target audience of launchpad. We're working with the real stuff here, not kids toys. Web interfaces don't scale to the level at which we have to work *all the time*. Just ask the BTS admins what happens when somebody scans http://bugs.debian.org/ to collect data. Oh, and hey - when SuSE are doing better than you at publishing the tools they use, it's a hint that maybe you suck. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: Powerfulness (was: tioga : a powerful plotting system in ruby)
On Sun, Jan 08, 2006 at 03:28:27PM +0800, Paul Wise wrote: > On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 23:52 +0100, Juergen Salk wrote: > > > I am just wondering if we shouldn't be more chary of using > > meaningless (or soliciting) phrases like "powerful" in > > package descriptions in general. > > Sounds like something that should be added to lintian. Too hard, too many combinations, too much investigation needed to pin it down. For example, there's over 150 packages using the word 'best' - I can't imagine that could possibly be right, but you never know without reading the thing... -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- | signature.asc Description: Digital signature
