On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 3:33 PM, intrigeri <intrig...@boum.org> wrote: >> not only are you completely dependent on an upstream distro's >> features implementation cycle > > I've no idea what misconceptions about Tails and Debian make you think > this, but this is incorrect in practice.
I really don't know why the moment I mention something about Debian, people get very defensive and assume I don't know something. Debian is nothing special, it's just a binary distro that requires no understanding to use — the reason it's a base for so many forks, including Ubuntu. The only reason people get defensive is pure rationalization due to being vested in Debian — like with that certificates fiasco, which, were it to happen to any less popular project or company, would result in its ridicule and eventual death (e.g., DigiNotar). Now, of course what I wrote is correct. For instance, you don't, and won't have UEFI support until Debian community decides to implement it in a way they see fit. Moreover, due to not gathering experience while working on said support, you will have nothing to do with the solution, once it's ready. Same with so many other things. You accept bug reports and maintain related bug / todo pages, knowing full well in advance that this leads nowhere. This also misleads users, e.g., I have seen someone on Twitter mention your earlier message about UEFI, applauding the apparent progress, while in reality you are just rehashing the same old information. > First, I fail to see what compiling binaries yourself buys you, in > terms of your level of dependency on "upstream distro's features > implementation cycle". Gentoo is not about “compiling binaries yourself”. Gentoo is a source-based highly flexible meta-distribution, each component of which can be easily changed and adapted to specific needs. Gentoo is as close as one gets to LFS, without having to actually do everything manually and while keeping decent package management. You wouldn't understand the advantages just from the description, because in boring distributions like Debian the developer is still a “user” — you need to go out of your way to modify system behavior. Debian does not encourage understanding and experimenting. E.g., I remember you, or one of the other Tails people asking on IRC: what good is ASLR? Indeed, how would you know, if the distro you use discourages users from deviating from stock kernels, to the point where you would initiate a long bureaucratic process for changing a single trivial kernel setting that is needed for Tails? > [contentless propaganda skipped] > So, yes, e.g. having UEFI support added to Debian Live makes sense to > me, as opposed to implementing in a Tails-only way and maintaining it > forever. Sure, it sometimes means we get the feature a bit later > (which is not that clear in this specific case). You have no idea what you are talking about. Whenever you *do stuff*, instead of waiting for someone else to do it, while engaging in useless “community relationships”, that someone will usually end up actually using the results of your labor. With UEFI, it's just too funny — you will likely end up using sbsigntool directly or indirectly (which is already used in Ubuntu), which contains my patches, which I added because I needed sbsigntool working properly in Liberté. Oh, and I learned something new, which was great. But I guess that waiting for stuff to happen is just as exciting. > If you intend to go on writing such bold public statements about > Tails, then I'd rather give you first-hand information that you can > base your affirmations on. Here we go, then. My experience absolutely > does not match your assumption. I'm personally quite happy with how > I've been learning new things when implementing features for Tails, be > it when writing Tails-specific software, or when implementing the > feature upstream, or when working to make Debian an awesome platform > to build the next Tails generation upon. Without being able to quantify that statement, it is just another politically correct contentless propaganda. I have read some Tails monthly reports, and items they are composed of are of the kind that I usually don't even copy from git commit messages to the changelog file in Liberté. I mean, it's nice to see people touting Tails features that were copied from Liberté (like unsafe browser [1], or memory erasure on boot media removal, or clock setting / whatever else), but from my point of view, you don't do anything interesting (so I nearly stopped following your project), which is a shame, hence my replies ITT. Think about what benefits your project. If you do hard stuff, you attract other people who can do hard stuff, whereas otherwise you attract people who know how to tweak settings / apply patches, and not much else. [1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2012-July/024964.html -- Maxim Kammerer Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
