[SlugLUG] Help Me Choose

[cerise at armory.com]

On Fri, Sep 29, 2006 at 05:37:22PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> FYI:  Phil saying "Debian politics" is a code-phrase meaning "I have no
> idea what the issue was".

   Oh, of course!  Didn't you get that memo?  No politics in debian.  No
flamewars either.  They're a bunch of rumors tossed around to keep the hoi
palloi out...
   ...
 
> AMD64 took longer than the rest of the architectures to meet the
> standard technical criteria for a stable release, so its "sarge" images
> were not initially included in the official 2005-06-06 release.  They
> fixed those problems two days later; thus the separate release
> announcement of 2005-06-08.  (They also had to move their canonical
> archives from the "alioth" development server to the main hosts, which
> also took time.)

   I see you're ignoring the flamewar about the proprietary modules for
the hardware on their eval boards. 
 
> The move from XFree86 to X.org took time because Debian has stubbornly
> treated all 11 (now, 12) CPU architectures as first-class citizens, and 
> requires that substantively everything work on each of them.  (For quite
> a few years, Debian had been the XFree86 Project's de-facto portability
> engineering lab.)

   Actually, much of it had to do with the changeover of the C++ ABI and 
proposed upgrade strategies.  But I suppose you've never read the email
discussions about that...
   Of course, even if your apparently made up excuse were true, it ought
to seem a little odd to everyone that apparently Debian treating all of 
their CPU architectures as "first-class citizens" meant a huge delay for
all platforms, not just a certain common few.
   Meanwhile, gentoo & ubuntu had theirs out in a decent amount of time.
 
> Bollocks.
> 
>   $ touch bar
>
>   $ ls -al foo.tar.bz2 
>   -rw-r--r-- 1 rick rick 114 2006-09-29 17:33 foo.tar.bz2
>   
>   $ tar xvjf foo.tar.bz2 
>   bar
> 
>   $ cat /etc/debian_version 
>   testing/unstable

   There's nothing I love more than copied/pasted shell commands that were 
obviously made up (here's a hint, Rick: You forgot the tar cjvf!) Meanwhile,
an actual copy & paste (with some edits to protect the "innocent").

$ ssh cerise at afriendsbox
Password:
afriendsbox 2.6.8-2-386 #1 Thu May 19 17:40:50 JST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux

The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.

Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
phil at afriendsbox:~$ touch blah
phil at afriendsbox:~$ tar cjvpf stuff.tbz2 blah
tar: You must specify one of the `-Acdtrux' options
Try `tar --help' or `tar --usage' for more information.
phil at afriendsbox:~$ tar -cjvpf stuff.tbz2 blah
blah
phil at afriendsbox:~$ 

   So how exactly do you explain that?

-Phil/CERisE