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: Is it time to abandon Dpkg?

Bruce Perens wrote:
> 
> It's become very clear that the rest of the Linux world is standardizing
> on RPM as a package format. Debian is the only hold-out. The Dselect user
> interface sucks, and shows no sign of getting better. We could do a whole
> lot for Linux by embracing RPM as a Linux-wide package format.
> 

Hmmm...I can think of one important reason right off the top of my head.
I think it very likely that if we do this, Debian will ceace to exist.

Suppose we go ahead and release Debian 2.0 as an all-RPM distribution, 
perhaps with a few touches of our own to the packaging software. We'll
be releasing everything Red Hat does, in it's own package format, all
over again.  Is this worth doing?  And why should anybody choose our
versions over theirs?  Why should they use an imitation Red Hat, when
they can ftp the real one for free, or pay $50 for a CD with a
commercial X server?

Or worse, perhaps there are incompatabilities between their packages
and ours.  All the commercial RPMs will be expecting the Red Hat way
of doing things, and may fail unexpectedly on Debian-based systems.
This won't help our credibility any.

With nothing distinctive about Debian, people with RPM Debian systems
will begin mix-and-match playing between Red Hat and Debian, and
finally Debian will fade altogether.  This would make me, at least,
very sad.  It will represent the failure of the free software
community to offer a viable alternative to the Great Corporate
Monolithic approach.

There are good alternative ways to keeping our distinctive distribution
alive in a Red Hat world.  We need, first of all, a next-generation dpkg
for 2.0, which can transparently handle RPM packages, and integrate them
(as best it can) with the debian packages.  We can derive a sub-program
to
do this from the current RPM sources, probably.  Everybody seems to
be complaining about the dselect interface, but nobody has actually
_done_ anything about it.  It needs to be rewritten completely, and
a X-based alternative should be available.  I'm willing to help with
the first two projects, although I can't help with X.

What do you think, folks?  Can we keep this project alive?  I'd like
to think so.

Thanks for listening (I won't rant as much next time, I promise...)
--Galen


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