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mag | 1 Jun 2005 04:49
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Re: Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?

2005-05-31, k keltezéssel 16.24-kor John Hasler ezt írta:
> Steve writes:
> > The Unix world was badly hurt by deliberate code forking during the 80s.
> > Those of us who lived through it are scared of a repeat.
> 
> I don't believe that a Free Software fork can cause such damage. 

Forks in OSS do have drawbacks, this is why they are generally frowned
upon. Of course there are cases when advantages greater than drawbacks,
esp. when the latter are minimized, e.g. by submitting back patches.
Taxonomists may argue that such forks has to be called spoons;)
Other taxonomist may also argue that Debian is an infrastructural
distribution, which is well suited to be the base of such "spoons".
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Russ Allbery | 1 Jun 2005 03:35
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Re: Dear Adrian Bunk, Please hold off a week or two

Santiago Vila <sanvila <at> unex.es> writes:

> * "unstable" is actually frozen, which means uploads for unstable are
> either discouraged, they remain in the limbo, or they are automatically
> put in some other distribution above unstable, like new-unstable, until
> testing or unstable becomes the new stable.

At which point there are *still* fixed bugs that don't make it into the
release.  They're fixed upstream, fixed in experimental, fixed in private
working repositories that don't get uploaded due to the freeze, etc.
There are also the bugs that people just don't notice.

As near as I can tell (and I've had a package affected by this), the
release team is doing a great job making sure that fixes that they know
about propagate into sarge.  There will be fixes they don't know about.
There will be RC bugs found after the release.  Debian is just far, far
too large to be able to release a bug-free distribution.  This isn't a
serious problem; this is just life.  If they're RC and actually
significant (some of the missing dependencies are RC but not really that
important for normal use scenarios), hopefully they can be fixed through
proposed-updates.

Let's not spend a bunch of time fretting about the last 1%.  Doing
something reasonable and then going with it will produce results that will
be quite acceptable in practice.

--

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra <at> stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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John Goerzen | 1 Jun 2005 04:00
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Re: Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?

On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 04:49:20AM +0200, mag wrote:
> 2005-05-31, k keltezéssel 16.24-kor John Hasler ezt írta:
> Forks in OSS do have drawbacks, this is why they are generally frowned
> upon. Of course there are cases when advantages greater than drawbacks,
> esp. when the latter are minimized, e.g. by submitting back patches.
> Taxonomists may argue that such forks has to be called spoons;)
> Other taxonomist may also argue that Debian is an infrastructural
> distribution, which is well suited to be the base of such "spoons".

Perhaps, but there are some issues with that.

In the ubuntu case in particular, I wish that they would be more
proactive in sending their patches to the Debian maintainers.  Asking
us Debian folk to go to an obscure site somewhere, wade through
listings of thousands of diffs, and find changes is difficult.  For
example, Python 2.4 is in sid, and I don't mind making my packages use
it now.  I'd appreciate any and all diffs from ubuntu folks.

Sometimes they are changing things for some unique "ubuntu way".  I'd
like to ask them: why must the Ubuntu way be different from Debian?
Is there a better way we could minimize patches and perhaps do
something like provide differing defaults?

I've also been on the other side of the coin, and something that makes
it difficult for the derivers is lack of communication from some
quarters of Debian.  I certainly recall frustration about inactive
maintainers, and we must remember that there are maintainers in Debian
that can't even be bothered to apply good patches when they see them.

Finally, I would like to see many more developers putting their
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John Hasler | 1 Jun 2005 03:21

Re: Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?

Steve writes:
 The Unix world was badly hurt by deliberate code forking during the 80s.
> Those of us who lived through it are scared of a repeat.

I wrote:
> I don't believe that a Free Software fork can cause such damage. 

mag writes:
> Forks in OSS do have drawbacks, this is why they are generally frowned
> upon.

I agree that they may have drawbacks, but I don't believe that they can
cause the sort of damage that the Unix wars caused.
--

-- 
John Hasler 
john <at> dhh.gt.org
Elmwood, WI USA
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Jacob S | 1 Jun 2005 04:48

Re: Keysigning without physically meeting ... thoughts?

On Tue, 31 May 2005 14:13:54 -0600
"Wesley J. Landaker" <wjl <at> icecavern.net> wrote:

> On Tuesday 31 May 2005 14:11, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> > On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 09:03:12AM -0600, Wesley J. Landaker wrote:
> > > I wrote this up to someone. I thought I'd share it, and get your
> > > thoughts. (e.g. anybody see any weaknesses in #1-#3 that *aren't*
> > > present in the typical meet, check ID, get GPG fingerprint,
> > > assuming #4 is always used afterwards?)
> >
> > Falsifying a government-issued ID is a criminal offence, regardless
> > of how often it happens (using it to buy alcohol is not important;
> > they simply raise the minimum age to compensate, so there's no need
> > to enforce it there). Falsifying a random photograph is not illegal
> > at all, and there is no reason why somebody wouldn't do it. Nothing
> > here has verified their identity with any strength to speak of. A
> > person who wants to generate an identity can do so with minimal
> > effort and no repercussions - so why wouldn't they?
> 
> Right, but they have to get it notarized (or forge a notary's seal,
> which is  a criminal offense, at least in the US) which requires
> government ID  (again, at least in the US). 
> 
> Regardless, how is this different from meeting someone in person? They
> can  just show me their fake ID--I won't know it's fake. (And, as you
> said,  forged ID happens a lot and is easily available. =)

So why bother with steps 1 & 2 when 3 is the only one that carries any
weight? Maybe there is a good reason that I do not know of, but I can
not think of any. I am genuinely curious, though.
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John Goerzen | 1 Jun 2005 04:59
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Re: Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?

On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 08:21:01PM -0500, John Hasler wrote:
> mag writes:
> > Forks in OSS do have drawbacks, this is why they are generally frowned
> > upon.
> 
> I agree that they may have drawbacks, but I don't believe that they can
> cause the sort of damage that the Unix wars caused.

Not only that, but we're developing some quite sophisticated tools to
manage them.  Darcs is my favorite example of this, with its "every
checkout is a fork, and every push is a merge" way of operation.
Quite powerful and elegant, IMHO.

I no longer subscribe to the "forking is inherently bad" idea.

Cooperative forking can, and often has, been a Good Thing.  Example:
baz, which is more or less a fork of tla.  In some ways, it serves as
an "unstable" tla, where new ideas get tested.

-- John
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Nathanael Nerode | 1 Jun 2005 05:02
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Re: More about GFDL

Cesar Martinez Izquierdo wrote:
> El Viernes 22 Abril 2005 14:37, Maciej Dems escribió:
>> I have a simple question concerning the GFDL discussion.
>>
>> Does the GFDL documentation which currently does not contain any
>> invariant section have to go to non-free as well?
Yes, until the GFDL is revised, mainly due to the so-called "anti-DRM
clause".

First of all, to avoid Invariant-Section-like problems, the document also
must include no cover texts.  Acknowledgements and Dedications appear to
suffer similar problems (though it's unclear).  (One of the things which
makes these worse than similar requirements in other licenses is that these
apparently must be included *in* rather than *alongside* the document, and
presumably in the table of contents as well.  The title preservation
requirements are also troublesome.)

But without all of these?  Still not free.  The "anti-DRM clause", as
written, makes the GFDL documentation non-free.  (We believe that this is a
mistake and hope that it will be fixed in the next version.)

In addition, the "transparent and opaque forms" section is of uncertain
freeness, and we haven't got a clarification.  It's unclear, but the
license may also prohibit pseudonymous authorship, which would be non-free,
and we haven't got a clarification.

--

-- 
This space intentionally left blank.
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mag | 1 Jun 2005 06:19
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Re: Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?

2005-05-31, k keltezéssel 21.00-kor John Goerzen ezt írta:
> > Other taxonomist may also argue that Debian is an infrastructural
> > distribution, which is well suited to be the base of such "spoons".
> 
> Perhaps, but there are some issues with that.
> 
> In the ubuntu case in particular, I wish that they would be more
> proactive in sending their patches to the Debian maintainers. 

> Sometimes they are changing things for some unique "ubuntu way". 

Okay, these were the problems.

And here is a good part of the solution:

> Finally, I would like to see many more developers putting their
> packages a distributed version control system like Arch or, better
> yet, Darcs.  

If everyone in the food chain, at least down from the debian maintainer,
would use that, it would greatly simplify problems with patch
management. Just I highly doubt it is doable.

It could also help to apply upper stream patches for spoons while
sticking to their spoonerisms ;), and even not giving them back in
patches again and again.

I guess that we, as Debian developers have no ground to criticise
downstream for doing things in their own way, provided they don't keep
pushing things deemed unacceptable.
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Matt Zimmerman | 1 Jun 2005 04:47
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Re: Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?

On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 09:00:33PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:

> In the ubuntu case in particular, I wish that they would be more
> proactive in sending their patches to the Debian maintainers.  Asking
> us Debian folk to go to an obscure site somewhere, wade through
> listings of thousands of diffs, and find changes is difficult.  For
> example, Python 2.4 is in sid, and I don't mind making my packages use
> it now.  I'd appreciate any and all diffs from ubuntu folks.

I don't want to repeat the discussion about pushing patches; there's a
perfectly reasonable one already in the list archives.  There are good
reasons why we do this the way that we do.

FWIW, the diffs you would get from Ubuntu would build for Python 2.4 _as the
default version_, which isn't what you want.

After Sarge, releases, it should be pretty straightforward for someone to
set up a script to mass-mail Debian maintainers copies of the Python
transition patches from Ubuntu (or all of the patches, if that's really what
they believe that Debian maintainers want).

> Sometimes they are changing things for some unique "ubuntu way".  I'd
> like to ask them: why must the Ubuntu way be different from Debian?
> Is there a better way we could minimize patches and perhaps do
> something like provide differing defaults?

You might as well ask the same question of any Debian derivative.  The
reason that derivatives exist is because people want different things.
In the case of Ubuntu, we outline on our website what we do differently.
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Stephen Birch | 1 Jun 2005 06:25
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Re: Is Ubuntu a debian derivative or is it a fork?

Michael K. Edwards(m.k.edwards <at> gmail.com) <at> 2005-05-31 13:56:
> What is the point of, say, harassing the glibc maintainer to take a
> patch against the version in sid, when he's planning on jumping to
> 2.3.4 as soon as sarge releases?  If you want evidence on which to
> judge the sincerity of Ubuntu's "giving back", watch what happens
> post-sarge.  I'm optimistic, largely because the Ubuntu folks seem to

Okay - you have my attention.  If you are right etch will be as
beautiful as Hoary within a few weeks of the sarge release.

Oh my gosh, I hope and pray you are right.

We are all watching ...

Steve
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