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: Unidentified subject!

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On Fri, 21 Feb 1997, Boris D. Beletsky wrote:

> Hi Bruce, You wrote:
>  Bruce>
>  Bruce> I think Debian would be better served by RPM as a
>  Bruce> package system for many reasons. We could abandon this
>  Bruce> deb-make/dpkg/dselect sillyness. We could be using the
>  Bruce> package system that Red Hat, Caldera, and _EVERY_OTHER_
>  Bruce> Linux distribution that has a package system is using now.
>  Bruce> We could have the capability for those other distributions
>  Bruce> to use Debian packages, and for us to directly install their
>  Bruce> packages without kludges like "alien". We could immediately
>  Bruce> have a better package-selection user interface. We could have
>  Bruce> _one_ kind of dependency, instead of 4 (soon 5 if we are to
>  Bruce> implement "Breaks:").
> 
> I don't know about the rest of "Linux world", but I like Debian
> packaging system as it is and do not want it to be
> RedHat-like-Debian GNU/Linux. Regarding dependencies, I don't
> remember Debian being Easy-To-Use-And-Understand linux. That's not
> the goal if you ask me, _Any_ Unix is hard to use and understand.

I find Debian generally easier to understand than most other Unices. But I
agree, the general Unix-type system is complex (but once you get the idea
of "small tools working together", it makes much more sense than
DOS/Windows/etc...). But it is necesarily complex, as it wouldn't be half
as powerful if it wasn't like this.

>  Bruce> What we are doing now is going off in our own non-standard
>  Bruce> direction and continuing to re-invent our own invention. Red
>  Bruce> Hat did the package system better, and simpler than we did,

Apparently not many people agree with this.

> Better? The only advantage I see is simpleness.

And on the disadvantages side:-

	* Simpler is not necesarily better
	* It's beyond our control - if RH decide to change the licence,
	  there's nothing we can do
	* Too much work to re-learn the packaging system and convert all
	  1000+ packages (plus then all locally-created packages by users
	  - _NOT_ good for publicity)

>  Bruce> and the entire rest of the Linux world has adopted their work.
>  Bruce> Who else is using dpkg?

2/3rds of the world is using MS software. So why don't we all switch to
Windows NT? Who else is using Linux? Who else is using Unix-clones? This
type of attitude is just ludicrously.

>  Bruce>
>  Bruce> Rather than talk about re-inventing deb-make, we should
>  Bruce> be exploring how to convert deb-make packages to RPM ones
>  Bruce> automaticaly.

Is this realistic? With 1000+ packages (and the user base), I don't like
this idea at all.

>  Bruce> Guys, we lost the fight. It's time to admit it.

Was it a fight in the first place? We didn't create dpkg to be a better
rpm, did we? Or did I miss something?

> What fight?! I always thought that there IS no fight between Debian
> and RedHat, each distribution had it's own goal (again, at least so I
> thought).

Agreed - RedHat's goal is to sell as much as possible, which is it's
weakness. But we're all based around GNU anyway, so why don't we all
switch to Hurd?

> And if we "lost the fight" as you say, hell! Who needs us anymore
> then, lets all switch to Redhat and some day we will tell our
> grandsons that WE had a "fight" with _the_ RedHat, and that we
> even almost won!

The problem is that such generalizations are dangerously persuasive to
some people. That's why "everyone" has to have the latest Wintel computer.
We must avoid this if we are to get anywhere further than where we are
now.

- -- 
Tom Lees <tom@lpsg.demon.co.uk>			http://www.lpsg.demon.co.uk/
PGP ID 87D4D065, fingerprint 2A 66 86 9D 02 4D A6 1E  B8 A2 17 9D 4F 9B 89 D6
finger tom@master.debian.org for full public key (also available on keyservers)

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