Re: Possible?! A Debian public repository for all complex code lineswith examples and scripts?
Yesterday, I also received a few precious observations (even
counter-views are welcome) from two gifted individuals. The
observations are too deep to let vanish into oblivion.
However, it is incumbent upon me to protect the privacy of those
gifted individuals. So I will only post a part of our observations,
while protecting the privacy of those intellectuals.
This post is for those who like to be enriched by others' visions and
have no reservation between 'Us' and 'Then', for which my motherland
paid dearly with a 1000 years of invasions, oppressions, umpteen
genocide and collective enslavement that continues even today by
Macaulayan-ism [references: myriads, especially, A Case For India,
Will Durant, The History of India, as Told by Its Own Historians, by
Henry Miers Elliot, Breaking India, by Rajiv Malhotra, Unbreaking
India, by Sanjay Dixit]
Best.
Rajib
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Submission from a Gifted Individual
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(intentionally via private email)
On Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 07:11:24PM +0530, Susmita/Rajib wrote:
> So is it then not necessary to have a repository of codes, with all
> permutations & combinations of possibilities with wildcards/regular
> expressions, redirections and so on, along with a wide variety of
> examples, be made available?
It is available online at the websites you enumerated.
> Have the complete code reference hosted
> by the Debian server itself?
Some of those websites can be copied into Debian packages, and those packages
can be added in the official Debian distributions. It's just that nobody has
done the work so far. Volunteer?
> Is not this general unavailability of those more complex codes — then
> becomes a de-facto non-disclosure of complex code lines — against the
> very Policy of Free and Open Source systems?
The man pages are typically condense definitions, useful as reference manuals,
not tutorials. All info is (should be) in the man pages, and the tutorials
usually don't cover everything. Having man pages (and ultimately the source
code of the software) available in the Debian distributions, is exactly the
disclosure of all info.
> Doesn't this non-disclosure encourage secrecy unless one attends a
> paid course to learn those tricks, permutations and combinations of
> wildcards/regular expressions and redirections involving internal and
> external commands?
It may be more efficient to pay a consultant. It's a choice to be made by the
user. Tutorials are also usually more easy to read than man pages for
beginners.
> Shouldn't all codes and tricks involving them be available for
> everyone to use,
As said, it's all available.
> but still have the system so robust that it can't be
> hacked?
That is an entirely different topic.
[...]
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My Submission
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Please pardon my leap-frogging.
> ... ... [snipped] ... ... Volunteer?
Desperately as I would like to, there lies a problem, as I didn't
follow an organised course to learn whatever little I know about
computing. This web-like learning comes as a detriment in this regard.
But given the benefits that I have had because of this kind of
learning, I would again choose this way. The only difference I would
want would be to create my own course/syllabi and my own teachers.
Educational institutes are like a tightly knit cabal, driven by their
self-interests (greed?) to have control/power over the collective
using knowledge as a bargaining tool. In India, we call these groups
the Left Liberal cabal (perhaps Woke in the US?), who are all the time
antithetical to national(sic,collective) interests, most likely because
of baboonistics (a term i coined to explain the default reactive
automated mammalian-limbic self-preservation drives, which the
ancients thought was 'ego'. The actions are much closer to egotism to
megalomania. Ego appears to be simply awareness, clouded by
self-preservation drives).
Dr. RMS and his tiny group was a happy accident that was the need of
the hour at the time.[...] much greater things
would have been achieved. Hurd unfortunately happened late.
... ... [snipped] ... ...
> (intentionally via private email)
... ... [snipped] ... ...
I am curious on the 'why' part.
Thank you for reaching out.
Please just note that these final barriers built up against the FSF
must fall for Debian to become truly an FSF. Presently, it is very
difficult to find really complex code lines easily, I have found. The
moderators at the forums.debian.net wield much power over users and
acts autocratically. If you protest, they would ban you, even if you
have never said anything negative to anyone.
And the Zero-sum Proprietary, Proprietary Game participants win hands
down as a result, taking the greatest of human virtues down with
them.
I therefore took much time in framing my draft.
[...]
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Submission from another Gifted Individual
_____________________________________________
Unfortunately this is a bit of a mess but you need to understand the
history and politics here.
First off, Debian, as well as the other Unix and Linux distributions
are a collection of lots of different things from differnet places and
you get an operating system out of it all. Something like Microsoft's
Windows or the old mainframe operating systems like DEC's VMS or the
various IBM operating systems, these operating systems were put out by
a company which had complete control over all aspects of the system
and it's documentation. GNU/Linux meaning Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, or
any of the hundred or so linux distrubtions just are not this way.
Unix and Linux distrubtions are a collection of many things from many
places. The 'ls' man page you mention is part of the GNU utilities,
not written by the Debian project, nor is the shell like sh, csh,
bash, zsh etc..
Unix Man pages have been around for many decades and each component
usually (not always!) comes with a man page. There's no single
company or organization that has any overarching responsility to make
sure any individual man page is consistent with another. Furthermore,
some things like some of the Gnu tools have documentation in a system
called 'info' and there's often files distributed in /usr/share/docs
and then some projects document things in web pages and in markdown
files like readmes in git repositories. There just isn't a single
point of documentation and I doubt you'll get everyone to
double-document things by making man pages AND writing documentation
in some global documentation repository.
It is unfortunate that today, sometimes the best documentation is by
doing a web search and reading though things on sites like
stackexchange or perople's personal blogs. I say unfortunate but it
works.
Don't get me wrong, it would be great if there was like a wikipedia
for all this but I doubt it will ever happen, and Debian is just one
of many different projects that consumes as well as produces things.
[...]
_____________________________________________
My Submission
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Yes, [...] I have been aware of the entire game unfolding since
2006, which is why I made a conscious choice to reject Doze in 2007.
And I shall still stick to that decision.
Let us please keep ourselves positive. Life on earth was also random.
But this is what fractal, Self-similarity, can achieve. You have the
entire earth as an example. Let us allow self-organisation to happen.
We should take a step and then step back and let things self-organise.
I believe in the Magic of life. I also often contemplate on whether we
are actually simulated. People such as you, me, ..., we all are just
islands of rationalism in a random ocean of reactive irrationalities.
Though I would never have trouble terming our rationality as only as
deep as a thin veneer that could easily be lost by a random accident,
but that you, i, ..., exist as unique beings seeking continuity in our
thoughts throughout our entire life speaks to me as a Test in a
simulated environment to perfect our physical neural networks (or
holographic computer programs).
Thanks [...]
_____________________________________________
Submission from another Gifted Individual
_____________________________________________
[...]
Unless I misread your message (which I may have!) you would like to
get people to create some sort of Wikipedia like repository for a
single well written coordinated online documentation for all of
Unix/Linux. At least, that’s how I read your message. This goes back
way before 2006, it goes back to the mid 1960s.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Unix). Linux is an off
shoot of Unix, and I don’t mean just a little, it’s definitely a
flavour of Linux. It’s a laudable idea. I had to learn it all the
hard way by reading nearly ever single unix man page and reading some
of the source code.
But if I were starting out, I would suggest reading the man page for
whatever shell you were using, bash for instance. And here again,
Linux doesn’t even have a “standard” shell! The original shell was sh
and then lots of people used csh and bash is relatively recent. But
starting with that and learning the basic tools also sometimes called
the bin utils, things in /bin, is a great base to start with. I don’t
know the books that are out there. I know there’s tons and tons of
books that have been written over the years. Not a single one is
definitive or THE book. The man pages is the closest you get to
something definitive.
[...] I hope I understood your query and hope I helped shed some light
on why things are the way they are. Not saying it will be impossible
to change but it’s gonna be hard. You probably would need a set of
monks to start collecting all things together and once you had some
excellent site, you might be able to get people to start using it.
Where to get a room of a hundred or so monks to dedicate their lives
to documenting this, I do not know.
[...]
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My Submission
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[...]
You didn't get me wrong! Perhaps the threat of an uncharted road and
final outcome ahead of us overwhelms. The threat of social ignominy if
so much of money, investment and time fail to achieve something
tangible.
In these circumstances, it is better to step back and relax. Allow all
the doves play out their roles. Wait for the system of Hawk and Dove
to stabilise.
Everything constructive is hard, This is how life is. We didn't know
that Linux would happen. But it did. We should put in our inputs and
then step back and watch the game from a distance, at best gently
nudging it from time to time, if required.
Monks will discover themselves. This is what kids who aren't
overburdened by academic pressure do. Their Consciousness has still
not broken free to self-reflect. Their Neural Networks are more
focussed on solving problems unburdened by enormous information
overload.
[...]
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