The debian-private mailing list leak, part 1. Volunteers have complained about Blackmail. Lynchings. Character assassination. Defamation. Cyberbullying. Volunteers who gave many years of their lives are picked out at random for cruel social experiments. The former DPL's girlfriend Molly de Blanc is given volunteers to experiment on for her crazy talks. These volunteers never consented to be used like lab rats. We don't either. debian-private can no longer be a safe space for the cabal. Let these monsters have nowhere to hide. Volunteers are not disposable. We stand with the victims.

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Re: exchange with Richard Stallman



On Sat, 23 Mar 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:

> The reason I rejected Richard out of hand was:
> 
> 1. He wants us to do things his way.
> 2. He wants us to do all the work of doing things his way.
> 
> See how even the most simple request such as "build the packages yourself"
> gets bounced back with "Can't you build them my way and run a complicated
> procedure to get packages the way you originally wanted them".

If he's intractable about both of those points, effectively demanding
that the debian project dedicate itself to being a FSF feeder 
organization, he deserves to be dismissed out of hand.

I've  never dealt directly with him, but the picture I get is that he's
pretty firm in his belief that His Way is The One True Way (and not
unlike some debian project members in that regard ;-).  However,
if he's willing to bend just a bit to accommodate us, and we're
willing to bend just a bit to accommodate him, we may be able to
find a mutually workable arrangement.

If we find such an arrangement, I think it's a win-win.  FSF gets a
maintained GPL'd linux distribution base with a GPL'd package admin
system and GPL'd or GPL-able packages which fit cleanly on that
linux distribution base from a well-maintained source.  Debian
gets significant exposure and significant credibility.

I'm admittedly shooting from the hip with my suggestions.  I think
I have a reasonably good "feel" for how far we might bend to accommodate
him, but I don't have much "feel" for what his real needs are, or the
constraints under which he operates.  My picture is that he
needs a distribution source which he can put out on CDROM and
net-access without inordinate investment of effort by the FSF.
Ian M. certainly has a much clearer picture of this than I do.

My judgement that the necessitity to build everything from sources,
and the necessitity to individually twiddle each of several hundred
source packages before building it to produce unstripped executables,
and to re-twiddle and re-build each individual package with each upgrade,
would be overly burdensome to him was a guess.  Offhand, however, it
seems to me that it's probably a good guess.

> For this reason, I declined to take his requests and attempt to sell them
> to our developers.

Here in debian-private, what's the feeling about his requests?

>> 1. We need to have packages with unstripped executables.

I offered what seems to me to be a reasonable middle ground suggestion
on this.  Is it workable?  It doesn't seem to me like it's very burdensome
on our maintainers -- in the main, it'd just require maintainers to remove
'-s' from the link flags when building packages, right?

Doesn't sound to me like a hard sell to our developers.

>> 2. We need to encourage people to write documentation in Texinfo. [...]

I think he's out of luck on that one.  I said that much more verbosely
in my first response, but that's what it boils down to.

No necessity to sell that to our developers -- it's undoable.

>> 3. We need simpler installation with clear documentation. [...]

You didn't dispute that, in general, and said that you're working
to make the docs better.  Part of that work could be to structure the
docs so that it's easy for him to pick up what's appropriate to him
and to leave behind what he deems inappropriate.  It didn't seem to
me that being sensitive to this issue in structuring the docs would
be a bad thing for Debian overall, or too much work.  Again, though,
I'm shooting from the hip.

No necessitity to sell that to most developers.  Only the developers
working on distribution installation documentation need to do
anything.

>> 4. We need a complete separation between what we distribute
>> and all non-free software.

This would be a burden on Richard to identify what he feels is
distributable by him and what's not, and on our distribution
maintainers to separate the FSF distributable packages from the
others or to identify them in some manner so he could pick up
the packages he's interested in and ignore the rest.  There'd
probably be some addition to the pagkaging guidelines necessary
in order to specify the criteria for FSF-distributable packages,
and a burden on maintainers of packages intended for FSF distribution
to comply with those criteria and to identify packages intended for
FSF distribution to the Debian distribution maintainers (could be
a boolean flag in the binary package control file).

Doesn't sound to me like a hard sell to our developers.

Richard needs to bend a bit on point 1, and capitulate on point 2.
If he's really concerned about point 2, he could lobby upstream
maintainers to go to texinfo docs, he culd work to find a way to
help them to do that.  He gets points 3 and 4.

We need to do some work, but it's a good time for it.  I gather from
my past involvement with dchanges that the mechanics of the distribution
organization and maintenance are a current work item, and you've implied
that distribution installation docs are a current work item.  We'd
need to pay some attention to FSF concerns in accomplishing those work
items.  Individual package maintainers have hardly any new work to
do at all.

This looks doable to me.  Am I misperceiving?