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: Question about my person



You (David H. Silber) wrote:
> > From: Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>
> > Subject: Re: Question about my person
> > 
> > 
> > > As you might imagine I don't like the idea of putting hours of work into new
> > > packages just to get such harsh emails. I can imagine better use of my time.
> > 
> > Indeed.  Imagine how I must feel about dselect ...
> 
> Sorry Ian.  I for one really appreciate the work you have done.  Without dpkg
> (& friends) there would be no Debian.  I have some problems with dselect, but
> I have not looked at it (or therefore bitched about it) for a while.  Perhaps
> it is time to look at it again.  My problems with dselect are, I think, mostly
> cosmetic.  (And I'm pretty sure that there is an awful lot of program "under
> the hood".)

Indeed. For me, as a UNIX cq sofware person the dpkg program feels right.
In fact it is ideal. OTOH, the dselect program was a bit hard to get the
hang of, but not harder than, say, vi ;). No, seriously. Not harder than
trn. OK, you got me there ;)

The point is, that developers like the ones on this list have no problem
grasping dselect. Other people have severe problems with it. For example,
my boss (or rather, collegue) Danny. He knows his way around Linux and
even loves vi (after I forced him to learn it). He's able to maintain any
Linux system and can even compile and debug programs without having a clue
about C. He cannot handle dselect, as I experienced this morning when I
came in and all packages from the section "devel" had gone.

"Sorry, I just wanted to install xwhatever".

I have, over time, tried to introduce many people to dselect. Nobody
understood it.

This is not a complaint Ian - just an observation. It is clear that
a better interface _needs_ to be developed. I understand that there
are efforts underway, and I would like to help out if that is needed.
However that probably has to be postponed until 1.2.

Now. There is a point I wanted to make, and here it is. It is really
needed that there is _good_ documentation. I see that the debian-manual
(the installation guide) still describes debian 0.93R6. Are there
efforts underway to rewrite this manual for 1.1 and Bruce's new
installation floppies? I guess this is more needed then anything else
before 1.1 is released. If needed, I could try to adjust the original
text to the 1.1 installation, but as you might have noticed from the
above paragraps English is not my native language.

Mike.
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