14 ms·

This significantly increases my respect for Zed Shaw. Yes, he wrote an offensive post crying for blood, but after he had a chance to cool down, he used his own

by hapless 16y ago

This significantly increases my respect for Zed Shaw. Yes, he wrote an offensive post crying for blood, but after he had a chance to cool down, he used his own fame and audience to exhibit a well-reasoned response from someone who disagreed. That's a very adult thing to do. In some ways, it's actually better than an apology.

gjm11 16y ago
That plus an apology would have been even better.
- zedshaw 16y ago
  An apology to who? I spoke my mind and made what I thought were valid points and I still stand by them. Debian is abusive to developers who create the software they need. It's only a matter of time before the programmers making their supply chain of projects declare enough. As a good reference for the exact type of behavior I'm talking about, see this: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=380731 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=380731 This is what I'm talking about. You can't treat people that way and not expect them to rise up.
  - davidw 16y ago
    You spread mistruths about Debian with your various "business" comments. That in and of itself merits an apology. You can't just go making stuff up about people because they irritate you. Also, from everything I can tell about your original post, you had a (well known) problem with Ruby gems on Debian, not with something you wrote. I can understand being irritated about that (Debian is not blameless, obviously), but there are jerks everywhere, and also an awfully lot of nice people in Debian too. Your lynch-mob mentality (seo tricks, in-person confrontations, etc...) reflects very poorly on you and is extremely unlikely to produce anything approaching positive changes. If you don't like the freedom others have with open source licenses, why not just go back to making proprietary software where you won't have the problem. Freedom means that people sometimes do things you disagree with (even vehemently so), and if you can't handle it, then perhaps it is simply not worth it.
  - cmsj 16y ago
    Debian is not abusive, some DDs are unfriendly some of the time. Some mistakes have been made. This isn't some conspiracy to ruin your rep. How about users/sysadmins "rise up" against ruby/python/php for having module distribution/loading systems which in no way try actively to be easy to package well? Tell us about the changes you are going to make such that all gems/eggs are automatically packaged for RHEL/Debian/etc so the overhead for DDs, and consequently their opportunity to confuse things, is near zero. That's the outcome we need. Are the languages prepared to make the changes necessary?
    - blasdel 16y ago
      We're not going to cripple our modern programming language environments to suit an outdated system designed around mutually-exclusive soname dependencies, and we sure as hell aren't going to prostrate ourselves as a community before your baroque unnecessary social process. It's not just us affected whippersnappers causing problems — even the enterprisiest Java communities have given up on your packaging model.
      - cmsj 16y ago
        So you're not prepared to change anything? Even if distros make changes as well? Why are these two groups not working together to enable magic for their users? Why would it be so bad, for example, to have something like this in a python script: import awesomelib >= 2.10 import specialsauce == 1.58 Of course this immediately opens up a veritable hydra of questions and corner cases and other considerations that need to be made in designing such a facility, but that's why there are smart programmers and smart distro makers out there :) I think it's fairly clear that there are grumpy, recalcitrant, belligerent people on all sides of this argument, and the people who lose most are the users that everyone claims to care about. As a user I feel that is deeply tragic and I feel like we have all failed.
        blasdel 16y ago
        import awesomelib >= 2.10 import specialsauce == 1.58 Is precisely the feature I love most about rubygems, and would love to have in Python. It's also a feature that Debian goes out of their way to eliminate because it violates their precious FHS, apt can't handle it at all (they get around that for important packages by mangling the names), and superficially overlaps with their 'alternatives' system. Where did you get the idea that I didn't want it? Unfortunately there's no implementation path to make it possible on Debian's side, no matter what the language communities do to compromise. apt can't handle it technically, and their release cycle process can't handle it socially.
  - loewenskind 16y ago
    Personally, I don't have a fundamental problem with a distribution (even a popular one) refusing to package something for their systems that they think is awful. Sometimes the easy choice is the wrong choice. If you just step back and say "well, they want to eat every meal at a fast food restaurant I guess I better make it easy for them to do that" then you are an enabler. All that said, they should get off the fence about it. If they don't want PHP development beyond the web on Debian they should put that in a policy somewhere and direct people to it.
adambyrtek 16y ago
He reacted in the right way, but on the whole my impression is negative. I'm a bit disappointed, because most of Zed's previous rants were humorous, amusing and well researched. But in this case he didn't put any effort neither in research nor writing. He'd stumbled upon a dependency bug and, instead of reporting it, he for some reason concluded that it means that Debian is evil and everybody should boycott it. Weird. PS. Excuse me, there was one amusing paragraph in the rant. The one in which he equaled Debian, the most independent and free software obsessed distribution out there, to Microsoft.
- blasdel 16y ago
  He didn't just stumble upon an overlooked dependency bug — the Debian maintainers intentionally broke their Ruby package years ago because of the legal problems they imagine to exist with using OpenSSL. I don't think it's so out of bounds to compare Debian, the most copyright-license-obsessed distribution out there, to Microsoft.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Maybe it's a name problem. It was said ruby-full provides the full Ruby language, while ruby provides the export-restricted version Debian has to distribute in order not to have police officers knocking down doors. In Python's case (sorry, I am more familiar with Python) there are python and python-minimal packages. They may or may not mean the same as ruby and ruby-full, but their names communicate a similar intention.
    - rue 16y ago
      "ruby-full" did not exist for a long time, nor does it still provide everything in the normal distro. So far as I know, that is, I may be wrong since I stopped paying any attention to what Debian does a few years ago.
    - blasdel 16y ago
      While "police officers knocking down doors" over crypto export restrictions do not exist, that's not what Debian's wankfest over OpenSSL is about. They think that the advertising clause in the OpenSSL license makes it impossible to use with any GPL programs — despite the fact that the OpenSSL developers think it's fine as a platform library and tons of upstream developers of GPL software choose to link against it. In Debian's world, they'll only allow you to use it if you get every contributor to agree to a special exemption clause appended to the GPL. Through their absolute fealty to the most draconian interpretation of the letter of the law, Debian does more to further the cause of software patents and non-free licensing than any other organization. They choose to demonstrate how idiotic such ideas about IP are by implementing them to their fullest — by being idiots.
zedshaw 16y ago
I didn't write it, Ersek, Laszlo did. That's how sheddingbikes works. Rather than comments, people can send responses as a post and if it's good I post it. Sadly, it's not frequently that people send in a good response.

by hapless 16y ago

gjm11 16y ago

That plus an apology would have been even better.

zedshaw 16y ago
An apology to who? I spoke my mind and made what I thought were valid points and I still stand by them. Debian is abusive to developers who create the software they need. It's only a matter of time before the programmers making their supply chain of projects declare enough. As a good reference for the exact type of behavior I'm talking about, see this: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=380731 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=380731 This is what I'm talking about. You can't treat people that way and not expect them to rise up.
- davidw 16y ago
  You spread mistruths about Debian with your various "business" comments. That in and of itself merits an apology. You can't just go making stuff up about people because they irritate you. Also, from everything I can tell about your original post, you had a (well known) problem with Ruby gems on Debian, not with something you wrote. I can understand being irritated about that (Debian is not blameless, obviously), but there are jerks everywhere, and also an awfully lot of nice people in Debian too. Your lynch-mob mentality (seo tricks, in-person confrontations, etc...) reflects very poorly on you and is extremely unlikely to produce anything approaching positive changes. If you don't like the freedom others have with open source licenses, why not just go back to making proprietary software where you won't have the problem. Freedom means that people sometimes do things you disagree with (even vehemently so), and if you can't handle it, then perhaps it is simply not worth it.
- cmsj 16y ago
  Debian is not abusive, some DDs are unfriendly some of the time. Some mistakes have been made. This isn't some conspiracy to ruin your rep. How about users/sysadmins "rise up" against ruby/python/php for having module distribution/loading systems which in no way try actively to be easy to package well? Tell us about the changes you are going to make such that all gems/eggs are automatically packaged for RHEL/Debian/etc so the overhead for DDs, and consequently their opportunity to confuse things, is near zero. That's the outcome we need. Are the languages prepared to make the changes necessary?
  - blasdel 16y ago
    We're not going to cripple our modern programming language environments to suit an outdated system designed around mutually-exclusive soname dependencies, and we sure as hell aren't going to prostrate ourselves as a community before your baroque unnecessary social process. It's not just us affected whippersnappers causing problems — even the enterprisiest Java communities have given up on your packaging model.
    - cmsj 16y ago
      So you're not prepared to change anything? Even if distros make changes as well? Why are these two groups not working together to enable magic for their users? Why would it be so bad, for example, to have something like this in a python script: import awesomelib >= 2.10 import specialsauce == 1.58 Of course this immediately opens up a veritable hydra of questions and corner cases and other considerations that need to be made in designing such a facility, but that's why there are smart programmers and smart distro makers out there :) I think it's fairly clear that there are grumpy, recalcitrant, belligerent people on all sides of this argument, and the people who lose most are the users that everyone claims to care about. As a user I feel that is deeply tragic and I feel like we have all failed.
      - blasdel 16y ago
        import awesomelib >= 2.10 import specialsauce == 1.58 Is precisely the feature I love most about rubygems, and would love to have in Python. It's also a feature that Debian goes out of their way to eliminate because it violates their precious FHS, apt can't handle it at all (they get around that for important packages by mangling the names), and superficially overlaps with their 'alternatives' system. Where did you get the idea that I didn't want it? Unfortunately there's no implementation path to make it possible on Debian's side, no matter what the language communities do to compromise. apt can't handle it technically, and their release cycle process can't handle it socially.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  Personally, I don't have a fundamental problem with a distribution (even a popular one) refusing to package something for their systems that they think is awful. Sometimes the easy choice is the wrong choice. If you just step back and say "well, they want to eat every meal at a fast food restaurant I guess I better make it easy for them to do that" then you are an enabler. All that said, they should get off the fence about it. If they don't want PHP development beyond the web on Debian they should put that in a policy somewhere and direct people to it.

adambyrtek 16y ago

He reacted in the right way, but on the whole my impression is negative. I'm a bit disappointed, because most of Zed's previous rants were humorous, amusing and well researched. But in this case he didn't put any effort neither in research nor writing. He'd stumbled upon a dependency bug and, instead of reporting it, he for some reason concluded that it means that Debian is evil and everybody should boycott it. Weird. PS. Excuse me, there was one amusing paragraph in the rant. The one in which he equaled Debian, the most independent and free software obsessed distribution out there, to Microsoft.

blasdel 16y ago
He didn't just stumble upon an overlooked dependency bug — the Debian maintainers intentionally broke their Ruby package years ago because of the legal problems they imagine to exist with using OpenSSL. I don't think it's so out of bounds to compare Debian, the most copyright-license-obsessed distribution out there, to Microsoft.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  Maybe it's a name problem. It was said ruby-full provides the full Ruby language, while ruby provides the export-restricted version Debian has to distribute in order not to have police officers knocking down doors. In Python's case (sorry, I am more familiar with Python) there are python and python-minimal packages. They may or may not mean the same as ruby and ruby-full, but their names communicate a similar intention.
  - rue 16y ago
    "ruby-full" did not exist for a long time, nor does it still provide everything in the normal distro. So far as I know, that is, I may be wrong since I stopped paying any attention to what Debian does a few years ago.
  - blasdel 16y ago
    While "police officers knocking down doors" over crypto export restrictions do not exist, that's not what Debian's wankfest over OpenSSL is about. They think that the advertising clause in the OpenSSL license makes it impossible to use with any GPL programs — despite the fact that the OpenSSL developers think it's fine as a platform library and tons of upstream developers of GPL software choose to link against it. In Debian's world, they'll only allow you to use it if you get every contributor to agree to a special exemption clause appended to the GPL. Through their absolute fealty to the most draconian interpretation of the letter of the law, Debian does more to further the cause of software patents and non-free licensing than any other organization. They choose to demonstrate how idiotic such ideas about IP are by implementing them to their fullest — by being idiots.

zedshaw 16y ago

I didn't write it, Ersek, Laszlo did. That's how sheddingbikes works. Rather than comments, people can send responses as a post and if it's good I post it. Sadly, it's not frequently that people send in a good response.