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: DPKG, RPM. Life sucks.

From: Riku Voipio <neurochp@nowhere.net>
> I fear that Martian and Alien are already to far - Just imagine the
> following begining of a mail in debian-user: 
> "I just found out that Redhat has version x.y.z of sysvinit and my Debian
> has x.y.z-1 , and decided to try alien..."

I don't know how to respond to "Martian and Alien are already too far".
Debian doesn't currently include suppression of new technology in its
policy set, even if that new technology could cause the above kind of
confusion. Do you have any suggestions?

> This issue has been talked a million times through - allways the same 
> conclusion - we want stick with dpgk.

Yes, no problem with that. I think the day will come when both DPKG and
RPM understand POSIX packages, since POSIX packages are so simple and
people seem to think there's value in well-documented standards.
However, this wouldn't prevent us from keeping dpkg, even though dpkg
would have a common package format with RPM, and with some number of
non-free Unix package tools. So, I think that faced with the above, and
with the presence of the "alien" and "martian" programs, we should be
prepared to justify the Debian system with more than just the dpkg
feature set. At the Linux Expo, a Red Hat sponsored event, there were
a lot of people enthusiastic about Debian once they heard me speak about
it. They seemed to understand that there was more to Debian than just
dpkg. Ted Tso spoke out during his own lecture that it was necessary to
have both dpkg and rpm exist because competition made for better products.

> And if redhat is planning to add all the features of dpkg to rpm, 
> why don't they just start using dpkg instead of asking us to use rpm???

I have discussed this with them a number of times. Erik said he would
have gone with dpkg, but the Debian project had too much politics (way
back then!). Currently, he doesn't like these features:

	1. The user interface (no surprise).
	2. The "Recommends" dependency.
	3. The "Suggests" dependency.

I suggested that he could ignore "Recommends" and "Suggests" with
impunity. He doesn't have a problem with doing pre-depends, and
multiple interpreters for installation scripts. If RPM adopts these
features as well as Debian, (and given that they already have
regular dependencies), we will have the political clout to have our
dependency system accepted as a formal extension to POSIX packages.

I think if we want to beat RPM, we have to write a better RPM than RPM.
In other words, it has to have a better UI than RPM or DPKG, and has to
understand DPKG, RPM, and POSIX packages. We have the technology.

	Thanks

	Bruce
-- 
Bruce Perens K6BP   Bruce@Pixar.com   510-215-3502
Finger bruce@master.Debian.org for PGP public key.
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