Re: If Linux Is About Choice, Why Then ...

[David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk>]

On Wed 12 Apr 2017 at 16:40:00 (+0000), GiaThnYgeia wrote:
> David Wright:
> >> Has Debian always been this crazy and am I so new to this madness?
> > 
> > If you don't like it, you're free to look elsewhere for a distribution
> > that better suits you.
> 
> Are you mr.Debian?  Under what authority are you telling me to either
> shut up or leave?

I've disagreed with your interpretation of the well known statistical
paradox (for want of a better word) that occurs before each Debian
release (look at the historical graphs, and google for the reasons),
corrected a couple of errors, and made a common sense suggestion to
someone who says that Debian is crazy. Where's the "shut up or leave"?

> What makes you more Debian than me?  Why don't you
> leave if you don't like criticism?

I don't mind criticism at all. I found the exchanges between the likes
of Nicolas, tomás, Joel etc most interesting. But I didn't see any
criticism in your (snipped) post; just misunderstood statistics etc,
which is why I commented on that one, and the other one like it.

> If there is reason for madness, in which I accept I am new to, I will
> have to discover it.  Saying that simply madness is normal and whoever
> does not like it should leave doesn't justify madness.

I don't accept your description of Debian as crazy madness, but I
accept it as your opinion, hence my suggestion. This is the only bit
of my post you've quoted, which suggests that you just want to rant
rather than understand the processes by which the Debian project
operates.

> If you like to contribute to my lack of understanding and possibly
> unsubstantiated criticism, help me understand the hierarchy.  Who, and
> how are they are selected, make the decisions and how do they relate to
> those that do the work, and how do they all relate to those who for 2
> decades have been employing the system and feedback with problems and bugs.

All this information is availble on the web, so I don't know why you
want me to paraphrase it for you.

> Because what is discussed on this thread to me sounds as those who by
> majority have used the system (mostly for commercial large scale server
> applications) and are probably the number one source of bugs that feed
> development did not have much of a say on the direction taken.  The
> direction was dictated from above and developers went to work according
> to that direction.
> Am I wrong?  I don't hear newbies single machine users having much of an
> issue with systemd, but people whose work for many years was based in
> fine-tuning other init systems seem to be having issues in adopting to
> this new status-quo whether they like it or not.

You keep making these assertions without any references, but I'm not
going to debate them with you. You can see what I'm interested in from
my previous posts. They're all in the public archive.

You can also see that someone else posted statistics (about numbers of
developers rather than RC bugs) in this thread to accompany their
rhetoric, and I asked them what they thought the statistics showed,
but no reply was forthcoming.

> As for the other post you commented on with the same attitude I would
> have to say that getting technical in comparing sysv with competing
> technologies does not answer the political part of the decision making.

I had a similar attitude to your made-up statistics there (you
actually said you had no data to prove them) as I did to the
misunderstood statistics here. I'm not interested in debating the
politics, as you can see from the rest of my posts.

> It seems as this part is what irritated people not the technical aspects
> of it.  Unless there are those that pretend the decision making process
> was solely on technical merits.
> That's where the definition of "free" comes in, which you seem to be
> having a hard time understanding.

I don't understand what you mean by "free" getting hazier, just as I
didn't understand "free" in your other thread:

| I'll stick to the "people who want ancient hardware" and ask whether you
| perceive those people as having a choice to "want ancient" hardware or
| whether this is "all" they have.  Do you anticipate those same people to
| be able to start their computing career in developing systems?
| Which relates to that world do we want Debian to prevail.  The "free"
| world or the "non-free" world in which we live in?

This last was taken from a thread in which you expressed a desire to
prevent people being able to upgrade Debian on certain hardware
("block and prohibit someone like me", "refuses the upgrade"). That's
why I don't understand _your_ use of "free" there.

> I'd say go back and read the policy
> and principles of Debian.  The realities of industry and market is not
> part of what I understand as free, on the contrary I find them
> contradictory.

I'm not really interested in debating that here, sorry. I've seen
too many flame wars in public forums like this. And I'm a technical
guy, not a political one.

Cheers,
David.