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: More massive uploads in the week before stable release



I apologize for my last letter - perhaps the tone of it was overly
critical, since you appear to have taken it personally.  I'll try to
lighten up the tone of this one a bit.  Hopefully?  :-)

$ fortune -m bug
Digital computers are themselves more complex than most things people build:
They hyave very large numbers of states.  This makes conceiving, describing,
and testing them hard.  Software systems have orders-of-magnitude more states
than computers do.
- Fred Brooks, Jr.
%
Quality Control, n.:
        The process of testing one out of every 1,000 units coming off
        a production line to make sure that at least one out of 100 works.
%
Acceptance testing:
        An unsuccessful attempt to find bugs.
%
Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature.
                -- Rich Kulawiec
%
Testing can show the presense of bugs, but not their absence.
                -- Dijkstra
%
As long as there are ill-defined goals, bizarre bugs, and unrealistic 
schedules, there will be Real Programmers willing to jump in and Solve 
The Problem, saving the documentation for later.
%
All programmers are optimists.  Perhaps this modern sorcery especially attracts
those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers.  Perhaps the hundreds
of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus on the end
goal.  Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers are younger,
and the young are always optimists.  But however the selection process works,
the result is indisputable:  "This time it will surely run," or "I just found
the last bug."
                -- Frederick Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"
%
Each team building another component has been using the most recent tested
version of the integrated system as a test bed for debugging its piece.  Their
work will be set back by having that test bed change under them.  Of course it
must.  But the changes need to be quantized.  Then each user has periods of
productive stability, interrupted by bursts of test-bed change.  This seems
to be much less disruptive than a constant rippling and trembling.
- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" 
%
As the system comes up, the component builders will from time to time appear,
bearing hot new versions of their pieces -- faster, smaller, more complete,
or putatively less buggy.  The replacement of a working component by a new
version requires the same systematic testing procedure that adding a new
component does, although it should require less time, for more complete and
efficient test cases will usually be available.
                -- Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" 
%
In every non-trivial program there is at least one bug.
%
And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug-reports
on it, you know they are just evil lies."
(By Linus Torvalds, Linus.Torvalds@cs.helsinki.fi)
%
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
%
There are never any bugs you haven't found yet.
%
Each new user of a new system uncovers a new class of bugs.
                -- Kernighan


:-)

Cheers,

 - Jim

p.s.  I still think we ought to have a "frozen" frozen, with some widespread
testing before the final release.  But that's just my humble opinion, and 
I'll keep it to myself from now on.





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