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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Recent dselect experience

I am concerned at the current state of dselect. Part of the problem is 
with the software, but the major concern for me is the poor reputation 
this product has amongst the developers and users comments that I have 
seen on the various mail lists.
It seems to me that we should be very careful in public to make only the 
most positive statements about the package system including dselect. This 
product is definitely still growing, but we do not contribute to it's 
grouth by denigrating it's current state. The software can always be 
"fixed", a reputation, on the other hand, is a delicately crafted 
relationship. Once that relationship is damaged, that damage may be 
irreparable. I suspect that Debian's reputation for late releases has 
been at times supported as much by the Debian Group as by "outside 
aggitators"

Preach mode off...

WRT dselect:

My primary objection to dselect's behaviors center around it's insistance 
that, barring escessive force, it should try and install every file that 
it can find with a .deb extension. I can deselect everything first and 
things seem to go more the way I expect.

Second, when declairing problems or errors, or at other times, the 
version information on a particular package is not available. Error 
messages contain text like: ...problems in version  of package... where 
space was left for a version number but not available at error print 
time. Having version information available on all packages.

Also, the packages file seems to have caused me problems from time to 
time. I don't fully understand the purpose it serves for dselect but 
there are several things that it doesn't do. Primarily, my experience is 
that dselect doesn't pay any attention to the state of the system before 
it tries anything. In cases where I installed the base packages by hand, 
dselect failed to recognize that I had done so and made a terrible tangle 
of an attempt to do it again. This poor integration with a current system 
make upgrading uncertain at times. 

WRT dependencies:

Several times during installation trials, large portions of the 
installation would be complete before a file, required by a dependency is 
either not found, or fails during installation. I'm not sure what to do 
about failures, but files not found should be detemined long before 
anything gets installed.

More will follow,

Dwarf

------------                                          --------------

aka   Dale Scheetz                   Phone:   1 (904) 877-0257
      Flexible Software              Fax:     NONE 
      Black Creek Critters           e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net

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