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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Switching to RPM (Was Unidentified subject!)



I've been trying to stay out of this since I'm way too busy with other
things and am finally making some progress on my Debian tasks in what
little spare time I have.  However, this issue is much too important
to ignore without throwing in my 2 cents.

On Feb 20, Bruce Perens wrote
> I think Debian would be better served by RPM as a package system for
> many reasons. We could abandon this deb-make/dpkg/dselect sillyness. We
> could be using the package system that Red Hat, Caldera, and
> _EVERY_OTHER_ Linux distribution that has a package system is using
> now. We could have the capability for those other distributions to use
> Debian packages, and for us to directly install their packages without
> kludges like "alien". We could immediately have a better
> package-selection user interface. We could have _one_ kind of
> dependency, instead of 4 (soon 5 if we are to implement "Breaks:").

I used to be in favor of this, but I am strongly against it now for
the reasons others have given (mainly we would either become a RedHat
clone or have to deal with the problems caused by clueless users
installing RedHat RPMs on a Debian system).  The only way I would
support such a move is if the RPM format were extended to prevent the
careless installation of non-Debian packages on our system.

> What we are doing now is going off in our own non-standard direction
> and continuing to re-invent our own invention. Red Hat did the package
> system better, and simpler, than we did, and the entire rest of the
> Linux world has adopted their work. Who else is using dpkg?

No, RedHat only did some things better and simpler.  Of course, they
set their goals/requirements a lot lower than we did.

As for getting the rest of the world to use dpkg, we must do two
things.  First, we have to make it much, much easier (read trivial) to
initially build and maintain Debian packages.  Debmake, not counting
Ian J's problems with its "design" and implementation, is a big step
in the right direction, but IMO, we must go further and make things
even easier.  Second, we need to get Debian into the hands of
prominent Linux developers at no cost to them so they can see the
quality of our product and start to use it themselves.  It's not
surprising that a lot of users choose RedHat because they see so many
influtential Linux developers using it also.

David
-- 
David Engel                        ODS Networks
david@sw.ods.com                   1001 E. Arapaho Road
(972) 234-6400                     Richardson, TX  75081


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