[SlugLUG] Help Me Choose

[cerise at armory.com]

On Sat, Sep 30, 2006 at 01:41:19AM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting cerise at armory.com (cerise at armory.com):
> 
> >    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...
> 
> Retreat to vague handwave noted without comment.

   Look, I know it's hard for you to understand, but that was usage of something
that we like to call "sarcasm".  Can you say it with me?  "sarcasm"?  I *knew*
you could...
 
> >    I see you're ignoring the flamewar about the proprietary modules for
> > the hardware on their eval boards. 
> 
> Must not have been much of a flamewar, since it didn't rate mention in
> any of the progress reports, and the AMD64 release came pretty swiftly
> after the other 11.  Meanwhile, the other, technical reasons cited
> approximately everywhere seem to have caused no raised eyebrows.
> 
> [XFree86 to X.org transition:]
> 
> >    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.
> 
> I see you've forgotten or become confused about your original claim,
> on which I was calling bullshit:  You were blaming Debian's slow move
> from XFree86 to X.org on "politics", where in fact development migration
> issues were at issue.
> 
> Apparently, you have abandoned your original claim, and we're supposed
> to not notice you suddenly dropping it like a hot potato when
> challenged.

   Not at all the case.  Rather, I'm supposed to notice that your density is 
very quickly approaching black hole levels.
   Did you run a grep against the mailing list archives?  Did you even look?
No?  I didn't think so.  So let me explain it.
   One of the main reasons X.org was delayed was because the switch happened 
to coincide with GCC 4.0 and a switchover of the C++ ABI.  In most cases, this
would have happened without anyone really blinking -- for the most part, you
build it and it just works.  It hasn't caused anyone undue problems in the past.
   This time was different.  It wasn't that the ABI was going to change 
anything, but rather some maintainers felt it would be better to wait until
after the changeover.  Someone else quietly pointed out that X.org ought to be
expected to run on the old one as well and it really oughtn't affect it in the
first place.  Round and round they went sucking in people from the other deb
teams.  Names were called, people quit, and the end result was an extremely
long release time.
   The politics involved in this discussion caused the X.org release to be
delayed a significant amount of time.  Those who aren't quite as dense as Rick
will notice that this was in fact my original claim.  Try to keep up Rick, eh?
   Politics, of course, are entirely unknown from Debian as Matthew Garrett
mentioned: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/66647.html
   Of course, I can already guess your response to that.  He didn't say the word
"politics", therefore I must be trying to evade my previous claim.
 
> >    There's nothing I love more than copied/pasted shell commands that were 
> > obviously made up.
> 
> You allege dishonesty at the drop of a hat, I notice.  Meanwhile, others
> on the mailing list have already confirmed my comment.

   And for good reason -- your supposed paste was wrong.
 
> > phil at afriendsbox:~$ touch blah
> > phil at afriendsbox:~$ tar cjvpf stuff.tbz2 blah
> > tar: You must specify one of the `-Acdtrux' options
> 
> Sorry to hear about your "friend's" broken system, but that same
> command on my Debian-testing server does the expected, exactly as
> before.

   Funny, so was the deb maintainer that I discussed it with.
 
> Now, if you want to place a $1000 wager on the matter, please do drive
> on over to my place; we'll load a default Debian "sarge" system from a
> official netinst ISO we jointly download and burn.  Be sure to bring
> cash, witnesses, and a prepared apology.

   Why not drive up to Seattle, WA?  I know of a machine there which has
the behavior I mentioned.  It struck me as odd too given that the code
would've had to have been quite mangled by patching in order for the
usual hyphenless options to have not worked.

-Phil/CERisE