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: FSF negociations

>>>>> "G" == Guy Maor <maor@ece.utexas.edu> writes:

G> My /bin + /usr/bin is 18 megs.  I'm guessing it would be about
G> double with symbols, or an increase of 18 megs.  My / + /usr
G> partitions are 174 megs used, so about a 10% increase in installed
G> size.

Isn't there a bunch of libraries in /usr/lib, or does that stuff not
have to be stripped?  Also doesn't having unstripped binaries have
implications for memory usage which is substantially more expensive
than disk?

G> I'm still undecided on this one.  Ten percent isn't much, but I'm
G> not entirely convinced that the symbols are THAT useful.  From my
G> readings of the bug lists, over 80% of the bugs are not of the
G> mysterious nature, and can be easily reproduced.  We can always ask
G> the user to recompile the package with symbols.

I think this is a key question.  How often would the symbols buy you
anything.  It seems so far that this was rarely the case.  Most of the
time I would think that symbols would be useful for software in the
"beta" stages.  Are many of our packages going to fall in that
category?  Couldn't we compile those with symbols rather than all
packages?

G> I do believe that source packages should make producing deb files
G> with symbols an easy task.  That's a separate issue, and not a
G> terribly controversial one.  Perhaps RMS will settle for that?

This is something we should definitely do.  Something like
./debian.rules binary-debug.

G> The benefits are largely the same as 1, but the costs are an order
G> of magnitude greater.

Actually, for the *average* user, the benefits are probably
substantially less.  Source for debugging (as opposed to a binary with
symbols) is mostly useful for people who can do something with it.
While the Linux community has more than it's fair share of
programmers, I think that a reasonably large fraction of the users (if
not now then soon) will either not be programmers, or won't
necessarily want to go mucking about in the code.  Lots of us will,
but perhaps not enough to justify forcing the source on everyone.

G> Meta-Conclusion:

G> We need to consider immediate benefits to the user first and
G> foremost.  It's very nice to have a technically superior product or
G> the RMS Seal of Approval.  But if nobody installs Debian but
G> ourselves, we lose by default.

I think this may be a really key point.  Don't forget, there are other
distributions out there, and Debian is a little behind on publicity
and user base.  Giving competing distributions the advantage of hugely
smaller installation requirements would probably not be in our best interests.

--
Rob