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.

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Withdrawing (temporarily) from the debian project



On Tue, 2 Dec 1997, David Welton wrote:

> I think a paring down of the distribution in some form might be
> beneficial.  Maybe something along the lines of really putting
> tightening down on the essential distribution, and opening up the less
> important packages to more frequent upgrades. Even though this is a
> particularly difficult transition to libc6, Debian certainly isn't
> going to be getting smaller or less unwieldy in the near future.  The
> long waits between releases also bother me - as I think it takes us
> away from the bazaar model of development, which is one of our core
> strengths.  I think something needs to be done so that the 'stable'
> releases can be more easily managed - making it easier to update.

i dont agree that the distribution needs to be pared down (we do need
better UI on our package management tools - dselecting through 1600+
packages when installing a new system is very tedious), but there is truth
in what you and others have said about the release schedules. 

that's the bad news. 

the good news, imo, is that this is just a temporary problem caused by the
fact that we are changing from libc5 to libc6.  Once that has been
accomplished we will be able to tell people "download package foo from
unstable, the latest version fixes your problem".  We were able to do that
between the 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 releases because the differences between
them were minor - same executable format, same major libc version, no
great incompatibilites and most importantly no great traps for the unwary. 

We can't and don't do that now because upgrading from libc5 to libc6 is
not easy and safe for novices.  Scott has done a great job with his howto
(i've used it on maybe a dozen systems now), but not all users will
understand the instructions or follow them properly.  Also there are just
too many incompatibilities and things which don't work any more (e.g. 
/AutoPPP/ logins don't get logged in wtmp at the moment - disastrous for a
debian-based ISP) 

we had a similar problem between release 0.93 and 1.1 - we changed from
a.out to ELF executables.  That wasn't as drastic or as complicated a
change as the one that faces us now (partly because the distribution had a
quarter as many packages) but it still caused problems for many people. 
After the release of 1.1, though, we were able to suggest unstable as a
solution to many problems. 

switching to libc6 should be the last change of this kind that we have to
go through for (hopefully!) a very long time.  One of the features
promised by libc6 is stabilisation of the major .so version number - there
will be minor changes and improvements but the major version is expected
to remain stable.

anyway, the point of all this is that debian has become temporarily more
'cathedral'-like due to the nature of the current work in progress. once
that's out of the way, we'll be back to the bazaar again...bigger and
better than ever. 



btw, i've only been half following the thread about Redhat 5.  I think
they have it easy compared to us - they only have to convert their core
distribution to libc6, and their core distribution is TINY compared to
debian....everything else in .rpm format is just "contrib" and not
offically supported.  We can learn a lot from their mistakes (and their
successes too) but i don't think we should rush the release schedule just
to catch up with them.  Our libc6 conversion is a much bigger and harder
job than theirs.  We only get one shot at this upgrade and if we blow it
(and thus break thousands of our users' systems) we screw our reputation
badly.  Better late than broken. 

craig


--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-private-request@lists.debian.org . 
Trouble?  e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .