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: Can I interest anyone in RPM?



Mark Eichin <eichin@cygnus.com> writes:

> I could support a switch (to rpm, at least -- I don't care about the
> higher level tools myself, but maybe that's due to aversion therapy, I
> mean actually trying to use dselect a long time ago :-)  but there are
> a few important considerations.  I've listed five here, as a starting
> point, plus some examples of where rpm is ahead of dpkg.  We need to
> discuss positioning/marketing/rationale *as well as* the technical
> issues of doing a change like this.  We also need to get 2.0 out the
> door first.

Just another thing: the RPM package format. (as described in "Maximum
RPM", Appendix A)

The lead is the first sign of shortsighted design. Its a C struct that
gets dumped into a file. The package name was limited to 66
characters. (Though the leads use for for file(1) is nice, could this
be done for .deb?)

Now the lead is basically orphaned, instead they invented the header
structure. They designed a method for storing structured data (like in
ASN.1 or Mach IPC). Then they need three pages to explain how to make
sense from this binary junk using od. Why didn't they use plain
ASCII? A manual on reading the control file in a .deb takes less than
5 lines!

It looks like the RPM format designers prefer to find complex
solutions for simple problems. IMHO this makes another reason against
using the RPM format.

(BTW: Is there a short summary on the functional changes between the
version described in the book and teh current on.)

	Sven
-- 
Sven Rudolph <sr1@inf.tu-dresden.de>
http://www.sax.de/~sr1/


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