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: how did this happen?

On Wed, 4 Jun 1997, Bruce Perens wrote:

> I thought the presence of a testing team would protect us from bugs
> like "user can't log on after system has been installed". I'm also
> astonished to hear from the testing team that they knew of X configuration
> not working, and let that go by.
> 
> Do we have some perceptual problems here?
> 
Yes, yours ;-)

No, only limited resources. The testing team did not discover this problem
because none of us boot our machines into X. This is the only time the
problem shows up as critical. I saw one report of this problem during the
one week pre-release. Since no one else yelled about it, and it seemed to
have a simple solution, I saw no point in pressing it if no one else did.
In fact, Bruce, your characterization of the bug is not correct, or maybe
I misunderstand. This is "strictly" an X problem and does not effect
normal user login unless the system boots into X by default, something we
should discourage during an upgrade in any case simply because X can be so
twitchy.

Also your statement that the testing team "knew" about the configuration
not working is somewhat misleading. There is nothing wrong with the
configuration program. Under normal X installation the problem doesn't
even show up unless some additional packages are added to the mix, and
even then, multiple passes over the install phase eventually get
everything right. It seemed at the time, and I haven't been convinced
since, that this was a package ordering problem. Unless you choose the
xserver-vga16 you don't even get the option of doing a configuration.
Xserver-vga16 recommends xbase and xbase recommends xserver-vga16, so
unless you leave both of these packages unselected, choosing another
server will cause no problems. Of course it will not do anything either.

I'm a bit concerned about your attitude Bruce. You seem to imply that
myself in particular and the release team in general haven't done their
job. We have been working under a consistent set of release criterion and
have been more concerned about the security problems with X than anything
else. (Clearly not on your priority list) I'm not trying to point fingers
here but I don't think you should be either, considering that we haven't
heard about your concerns or priorities until after the release was
authorized.

If you honestly thing that the testing group did a slipshod job and are
willing to advertise that fact more widely than this group, I can
guarantee there will be no testing group for the next release. This is
hard work. At least as hard and frustrating as any development effort. Our
principle goal for this release was to guarantee that the "standard"
installation run as smoothly as possible and I have been given every
assurance that we were successful at this. Even with the meager resources
at my disposal I was able to get X tested on several platforms, but only
under conditions of "new" installation. This is an optional package after
all.

If I can hold onto the committed testers I have, and add even 5 - 10 more,
I will be able to tackle the "complete" testing problem, but, considering
that I almost lost one of my most diligent testers to a simple
miss-communication with Sven, the kind of position you are taking will
make it impossible to convince these folks that what they are doing is
appreciated. (By the way, you are the only one to have taken this
position. All the other feedback I have received is that this release is
far superior to the last one, and that the testing team is at least
partially responsible for this "sad" state of affairs)

Have I just completely misunderstood you Bruce?

Waiting is,

Dwarf
-- 
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aka   Dale Scheetz                   Phone:   1 (904) 656-9769
      Flexible Software              11000 McCrackin Road
      e-mail:  dwarf@polaris.net     Tallahassee, FL  32308

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