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: 1. RFD: Reorganization of the Debian Project

[ Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list. ]

Fabrizio Polacco:
> saying that _we_ (debian's developers) should not release the
> distribution is not like saying that will be _no_ distribution and
> release, but that there will be _many_ Debian Distributions.

So, instead of making one really good distribution, there should
be a dozen mediocre ones? Fragmenting the Linux scene further
is not a good idea.

(Note that I'm not speaking against specialized distributions based
on Debian, but they're interesting for small groups of people and not
relevant in a discussion about general purpose distributions.)

I think I've used the following scenario in an earlier iteration
of this discussion:

	Imagine you're the sysadmin for a company. You're underpaid,
	overworked, and if you can't keep the machines working, you're
	toast. After looking at various options, you need to decide
	between Red Hat and Debian. In your situation, you need to
	make sure administration is minimal. Red Hat has releases. You
	know when you can upgrade, and expect the result to work
	with few problems. There may be a few problems, but mostly
	the upgrades are painless. With Debian, you read the mailing
	lists and the bug database, and try keep track of which
	new versions of all the various packages work together, so
	that you won't break anything too much when you upgrade.
	
	Which system do you choose?

Here's another scenario, for the monthly snapshots:

	You're a mostly computer illiterate, but very curious computer
	user, and you've heard really great things about Debian. So
	you subscribe to the monthly CD's. The January snapshot had
	incompatible versions of the kernel on the installation disks 
	and gcc. Damn, better wait until February. The February snapshot
	installs the base system, but the new malloc exposes bugs in
	the X server, so you can't use X at all. Damn again, better
	wait until March. In December, you decide not to continue your
	subscription, since there's always something that breaks, and
	while the help you got on debian-user was wonderful, you had
	to assemble a working system from seven different CD's, which
	was really clumsy.
	
	During Xmas, you borrow a Red Hat CD from a friend,
	and thirty minutes later everything just works.
	
	When another friend asks about Linux, which distribution
	will you suggest?

When we make a release, we make sure that everything
works together, not just small groups of packages in
isolation. Everything includes manuals and boot disks. It's more
work for us as developers. For users, it's a way to control the
chaos that is Linux. If we don't do it for them, they will have
to become developers and do it themselves, and that will kill
Debian, except as something curious a few oddballs are playing
with by themselves, while everyone else is happy with Red Hat.

Users should not be testers.

I think I've exhausted myself with this iteration of this
discussion.  I assume I've not been unclear about my point
of view. If the consensus is that releases are a bad idea,
then so be it. I don't wish to play Don Quixote.

-- 
Please read <http://www.iki.fi/liw/mail-to-lasu.html> before mailing me.
Please don't Cc: me when replying to my message on a mailing list.

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