Re: expiry announcement
On Wed, Nov 15, 2000 at 07:07:06PM -0800, Pete Lypkie wrote:
> > You know what the big difference between Corel, Stormix, and Progeny is?
> > How many of the people working on Corel Linux are Debian developers,
> > active or otherwise? Not many. Stormix? A couple more, but the obvious
> > examples have actually left the company for one reason or another.
>
> Please name these people. The only debian developer that has left stormix is
> Garth (whom i haven't met). Garth left Stormix about 15 months ago, when
> there were about 6 people working at Stormix. There are now about 60, with
> about half programmers.
... I am mistaken then, I thought you were no longer working with Stormix
either.
> Sure progeny has lots of debian developers, but lets see you try to attract 30
> debian developers to your city to work for you....we have almost 30
> developers, and we're not going to exclude good free software programmers just
> because they aren't in debian yet.
We haven't tried to hire 30 Debian people yet. Eric Gillespie is not a
Debian developer yet, but he's in the NM queue. The people hired to work
on our Debian stuff are Debian people because it makes sense for the
people working on it to know the way Debian works, what the Debian policy
says we should do with packages, etc.
> And find me a Corel developer that has the gpg signatures that i do. In fact,
> find me any Corel developer that has any signatures of a debian developer. I
> believe that at the moment, i have more debian developer signatures on my gpg
> key than any other developer. i think that indicates at least a small amount
> of communication is happening somewhere.
Find a Corel developer that knows what gpg is... ;)
> i think comparing Stormix to Corel is apples to oranges. i think Ryan Murray
> will probably have something to say about this too, but he's in Las Vegas at
> comdex right now, pitching the advantages of debian to all who come past. You
> can even see debian logos all over our booth!
> ( http://people.debian.org/~plypkie/debian_comdex.jpg )
Yes, my apologies for that. I didn't mean to insult Stormix THAT badly by
comparing them to Corel.
> Last time i talked to the Corel guys, they came over to our booth to ask US if
> THEIR distro was potato or not. gimme a break!
...why am I not surprised?
> > Most of what they've done has been completely useless outside their own
> > distributions. From Progeny, how's dexter just for a start? That's what
> > Progeny does.
>
> Bull! dexter is a configuration program. so is storm administration system.
> please explain why dexter is somehow better.
It works with Debian out of the deb (because it was written to do that)
and if a couple of the other pieces of software Branden uses are available
on your system, it can configure X without asking you one single question.
That's saying something, since nobody else has a silent X configuration
yet (because it's certainly not trivial to write one, obviously!)
> I can see how you might not want the Stormix install program in debian,
> because debian already has one, and they're aimed at different audiences. but
> i don't think it's "completely useless outside" our distro. For instance,
> have you seen the code for the "keyboard detector"? it has some really neat
> code that asks the user questions about keys on their keyboard, and can
> determine which keyboard you have usually in about 3 keystrokes (although it
> takes a little more for qwerty keyboards because of the abundance of small
> variations). This is useful code, and i haven't seen a similar program
> anywhere else. This is just one example.
That and your installer is less polished than even Debian's text-based
installer in potato.. Given that it's simply assumed that whenever there
is a question about Debian's installer that the answer is it sucks,
obviously your installer needs a little work from your last release. =)
I hope you're planning to look at the udeb-based system that joeyh and
friends are working on, it looks very promising.
Corel? They install a LAN-connected box with a blank root passwd and give
you exactly one chance to change it, without any explanation of what a
root password is, much less why you care. If you bump the mouse and it
closes the window, you will never again be asked to change root's passwd
from blank to something useful - as if I'd be willing to actually set a
root passwd from their root login after it had been wide open on the
network like that.
> anyway....I like the things that Progeny is doing, but i think putting Stormix
> in the same category as Corel is silly.
I think some parts of Storm kinda suck at the moment (and Debian for that
matter), but Corel is just full if STUPIDITY the likes of which no
self-respecting Linux distribution on the planet would DARE ship with. So
please don't believe I consider anybody at Stormix that stupid.
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> GnuPG key 1024D/DCF9DAB3
Debian GNU/Linux (http://www.debian.org/) 20F6 2261 F185 7A3E 79FC
The QuakeForge Project (http://quakeforge.net/) 44F9 8FF7 D7A3 DCF9 DAB3
<Knghtbrd> Subject: [GR PROPOSAL] Should we vote on trivial matters?
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