Submitted by The following letter was received from Eric S. Raymond, who has sent it to a number of Linux-related publications and mailing lists. It is presented verbatim. “After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my limit today, when an attempt to upgrade one package pitched me into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable.”
…don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
ESR,
*Do* let the door hit you on the way out.
ESR reminds me a lot of Norma Desmond from “Sunset Boulevard”.
Edited 2007-02-21 17:16
“…don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”
I love that!
Amateur go use a distro that holds your hands like Debian.
:B
It hurts knowing Raymond used Fedora Core…I’m slightly disgusted even…
Maybe he’s got things to do instead of screwing with his OS constantly? That’s what drove me off Linux.
– chrish
I’ve occasionally used Fedora machines and I can certainly symphatize with his pain. The yum/rpm system is flawed at its core and causes more problems than it solves.
Package management through the ports system is one of the major reasons I run FreeBSD whenever possible. Some Linux distributions have imitated the ports collection with some success. I hope more follow suit. KISS!
Ports is nice, although, I am an apt fan myself.
Nothing beats apt-get for me.
I cannot stand RPM based distros, my first bad experience was with Mandrake, then Fedora, then lastly Suse.
Don’t get me wrong, they are all good distros, as long as you stick with the originally included software, or use the officially supported repositories.
But, adding everything else is a nightmare.
No, apt-get or Synaptic or Adept are sweet.
“No, apt-get or Synaptic or Adept are sweet.”
Have you tried Aptitude? It’s a console front-end. Much better than dselect and now the default for Debian. Also, faster to start than their GUI counterparts.
Hasn’t apt-get been ported to Redhat distros and made to use RPMs? Why don’t RPM based distros use the tried-and-true APT instead of yum, urpmi and all the other assorted other package managers that just aren’t up to speed?
I mean the RPM format itself is fine, just need better quality control for the packages… Couple that with APT and you have a fine system. Though, if you did that, you might as well switch to a DEB/APT based system.
RPM has been out of development for a long time… I don’t understand how the RPM distros could let something so essential to them stagnate for so long. Now they are finally restarting development, and I ask myself, “Why don’t they just convert to a format that is already polished and can do everything they want?”.
NIH is a disease.
Why don’t RPM based distros use the tried-and-true APT instead of yum, urpmi and all the other assorted other package managers that just aren’t up to speed?
Blag does.
http://www.blagblagblag.org/
It’s based on Fedora and comes with non-free codecs. I tried and liked it. Didn’t stick with it, but I forgot why. I probably still had distro fever.
Edited 2007-02-21 18:02
Assuming NIH is indeed a disaster. For one when Fedora switched to using Yum, apt-rpm was completely unmaintained and apt and debian in general have no multilib support.
See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/Apt for more details.
I meant the NIH in reference to avoiding DEB as a replacement for RPM.
I understand that there were/are missing a couple requirements in the DEB/APT combo for Fedora and friends; what I wonder is: Wouldn’t it be easier to extend the existing APT/DEB systems to encompass the new requirements instead of trying to reinvent the same thing from the ground up?
According to your link, apt-rpm does have multilib support now… better late than never
.
“I meant the NIH in reference to avoiding DEB as a replacement for RPM. ”
Why? RPM has existed before Deb did and RPM has a format is much easier to build and supports more features. There are many disadvantages such as losing any capability to upgrade. Is there any advantage to choosing .deb format? The issues regarding package management are not at the level of the format.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to extend the existing APT/DEB systems to encompass the new requirements instead of trying to reinvent the same thing from the ground up? ”
You know. People arent stupid. The link I provided earlier already explains many of the other reasons why switching formats or tools isnt that easy. It simply doesnt resolve any actual issues that we do have.
“According to your link, apt-rpm does have multilib support now… better late than never
.”
Right. This was long after Yum backend was added to all the Fedora tools and Anaconda. So its not worth the pain to switch at this point. Noone has so far brought out any substantial arguments on why switching packaging formats would solve anything.
Yes,
There is *one* advantage that Debian/Apt based distros have. And that is the number of OSS packages available in their repositories.
That advantage is undeniable.
(Though when it comes to non-oss packages, with deb you’re often SOL.)
OK. So apt is a bit faster than yum, too.
Aside from that, and I use both, RPM feels like a more solid package manager to me.
dpkg, when I drop to it, just doesn’t ever seem to have the options I need.
rpm does.
Debian and its kin depend more heavily upon central control because Debian is used to being in absolute control. Yum allows for more decentralization.
This will probably piss some people off, but I believe that yum/rpm is more in the spirit of OSS than is apt/deb.
And although I have had my rpm database corrupted a few times in the last several years, fixing it is quite straightforward.
When dpkg’s database breaks, and it does, there is no recourse.
Give me Yum and RPM any day!
Edited 2007-02-21 18:53
You must be joking: apt is not “a bit” faster than rpm. It is warp speed compared to rpm. Last time I tried SUSE 10.2, and I think it has a solid desktop. I refrained from using on for a longer period of time due to the terrible state rpm is in. It really is terrible: it is dog slow, the database is corrupted too often, and it lacks the options apt has.
What do you mean by “central control”??? That’s standardization. Or are you in favor of a SUSE rpm, a Mandrake rpm, and a Red Hat rpm?
Why is yum/rpm more “in the spirit of OSS”??? apt is OSS software, and so is rpm. What’s the important difference I am missing?
“””
You must be joking: apt is not “a bit” faster than rpm. It is warp speed compared to rpm. Last time I tried SUSE 10.2, and I think it has a solid desktop. I refrained from using on for a longer period of time due to the terrible state rpm is in. It really is terrible: it is dog slow, the database is corrupted too often, and it lacks the options apt has.
What do you mean by “central control”??? That’s standardization. Or are you in favor of a SUSE rpm, a Mandrake rpm, and a Red Hat rpm?
Why is yum/rpm more “in the spirit of OSS”??? apt is OSS software, and so is rpm. What’s the important difference I am missing?
“””
I use a mix of CentOS, Fedora, and Ubuntu every day.
What distros to you use daily? I would say that apt-get is significantly faster than yum. Not a night and day difference. But noticeable.
By central control, I mean that the Debian devs hava a hissy fit at the prospect of a *strong* Debian based distro communing into its own… that doesn’t happen to be Debian.
It is the allowance for decentraization that Yum encourages, but which the Debian guys always seem to scream bloody murder over when faced with the prospect that makes Yum seem more in the OSS spirit to me.
Sigh. Once again, people get hung up on rpm vs deb, apt-get vs yum. What really matters is a distributions packaging policy. Without a proper one, conflicts are unavoidable.
Personally, I’ve used Debian for ten years now (since january 1997 after 14 days with Red Hat), and I haven’t even tested another distribution since. Why? Because it has been such a hassle-free ride due to Debian’s mandatory system and packaging policy: http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/
I’ve been running Unstable most of the time since I started using apt-get in 1999. I’ve reinstalled from scratch only three times since then. Once in 2002, and twice last year, the last time because of a hd failure (fortunately only the system disk). I’ve upgraded the hw much more frequently. Debian is just that easy to get along with.
“What really matters is a distributions packaging policy. Without a proper one, conflicts are unavoidable.”
I found the PBI concept used by PC-BSD to be a good solution for novice computer users as it allows them to do multiple add and remove operations without having to deal with dependencies. On the other hand, this solution consumes more disk space.
But there are always people that find “doubleclick, next, next, next, next, OK” complicated. Things like “apt-get update”, “make install” or “pkg_add -r xmms” surely would be pure soul terror for them.
in the older versions of fedora (2, 3) you had a choice between yum and apt. but all the apt repositories are gone now and yum has been forced on all fedora users. thats why i stopped using fedora.
Because you’re all talking out of your asses, basically.
I have never seen a major user-facing package issue in a stable release of any distro that was caused by the package manager.
Take the post you’re replying to. The author is saying, essentially, that apt-get is better than yum / urpmi / whatever because on apt-based distros he’s had better luck using packages not from the official distro repository.
This is just…um…silly. I can believe the experience he had, but ascribing the cause as the package manager is just wrong. Why would you even do that? Isn’t it clear to anyone who looks at it for more than two seconds that the problem is far more *likely* to be with the non-official stuff he tried to install?
Package managers do a fairly simple job, really. They look at a list of things required to install another package and try and install them from a pre-defined set of repositories. Now there’s a lot of gravy, but that’s really the core job.
Now, packaging and mirroring, that’s a whole different story. There’s about seven zillion different things that can go wrong even assuming perfect user behaviour. When you throw in users who will happily try and install stuff from the wrong version of the distro, stuff from other distros, or random things they found on rpmfind.net, it’s a miracle things don’t go wrong more *often*. It’s also something the distributor has very little control over. If the Fedora project or Canonical or Mandriva makes a mistake in the packaging or mirroring of their official repositories, that’s our fault. But when users use third party repositories over which the distributor has no control, or tries to install a package for OpenSUSE on Fedora because they couldn’t find a native one – there’s no package manager that’s going to handle that very well, and you can’t go around slinging mud at the distributor.
I have very little experience with Fedora (I install it in a VM and poke it occasionally) but I’d bet money that the issues ESR identifies are all issues with packaging and mirroring, not with yum. I can believe that yum is slower and less full-featured than other package managers, but I have difficulty believing that the Fedora community could come up with – and stick with – a package manager that didn’t do the very simple core job of a package manager.
I suspect people generally have fewer problems when doing bad things on apt-based systems (installing packages from other distros, etc) because apt-based systems aren’t as far diverged from each other as rpm-based systems are. But this is just an accident of distro history, it doesn’t mean apt-based distros are somehow superior.
I have never seen a major user-facing package issue in a stable release of any distro that was caused by the package manager.
Note that I am running Ubuntu as I post this:
http://linuxrevolution.blogspot.com/2006/08/ubuntu-update-breaks-xo…
How is that caused by the package manager?
They released an X.org update that was broken. The package manager didn’t do anything wrong: it installed the updated package. It’s not apt-get / aptitude’s fault that the package was broken.
That right there is my *point* in a nutshell, actually.
“Hasn’t apt-get been ported to Redhat distros and made to use RPMs? Why don’t RPM based distros use the tried-and-true APT instead of yum, urpmi and all the other assorted other package managers that just aren’t up to speed? ”
That’s what PCLinuxOS does. I guess they use rpm because it was derived from Mandrake, but they have Synaptic as the package manager
True.
The yum/rpm system is flawed at its core and causes more problems than it solves.
There is nothing wrong with yum/rpm, apt-get/dpkg or other similar packagemanagement/packaging tools out there.
The problem is instead that there is no standard on what a files a package with a certain name and version should contain, and where they will end up when installed.
This means that we easily get hurt if we dare to use repositories other than the standard ones from our distro.
The reason .debs have been better in the past simply comes from the fact that there was just one debian. Now that the number of distros using slightly different packaged .debs, they will face the same problem as rpm based distros.
In fact I have had much more problems mixing Ubuntu and original Debian repositories, than I ever have had mixing Fedora standard repositories and e.g. freshrpms.
So, I wish Eric best of luck on his new Ubuntu, but I think he might find that .deb land is not better than Fedora at least not with respect to packaging system.
Except that ubuntu has way more packages than fedora (even with fedora-extra), I hardly need to build something myself on ubuntu, while I had to on fedora (or I had to find an external rpm and pray for it to works).
More in numbers maybe, but well packaged, up-to-date packages, no way. I much prefer the at least attempted cohesiveness to maintaing “Extras” than the free for all known as Universe, with its outdated, poorly spec’d packages.
“In fact I have had much more problems mixing Ubuntu and original Debian repositories, than I ever have had mixing Fedora standard repositories and e.g. freshrpms. ”
I don’t see any reason to mix repositories of different distros. It’s like mixing different fuel and expecting your car to behave normally.
No, it’s not at all.
Why can’t people use valid analogies?
“No, it’s not at all.
Why can’t people use valid analogies?”
Such as?
It’s like mixing different fuel and expecting your car to behave normally.l
Not such a good analogy anymore. Most of the fuel in the U.S. is a mix of gasoline and ethanol. It works well in most cars actually. I have a friend that burns used peanut oil in his diesel truck. Ater you strain out the left over tidbits from the fried fish sticks it actually burns rather nice. Smells a little fishy though.
” Not such a good analogy anymore. Most of the fuel in the U.S. is a mix of gasoline and ethanol.”
I should have specified a bit more. I don’t know about U.S., but in my country we have normal and super, plus several ecofuels, all distiled from petroleum. I wasn’t talking about alternative fuels.
But no, is not a good analogy after all. But this is OSAlert, not OilNews, so we should be talking about IT related things, not fuels.
In this sense I think rpm’s early popularity hurt it: RPM got popular and every Tom Dick and Harry developer started packaging his own. Of course, he did it for like 3 different popular distributions and because they often mixed fine people mixed them (eeek!).
It seems to me like it might be time to get behind source distribution methods (not the current source distro’s, none are what I’d called “desktop appropriate”). The idea being to make a _nice_ (emphasis on nice) GUI that can build tarballs with automake build systems, install them, and manage them centrally.
It may require more changes to current source distribution, but it’d be good if you can check for installed packages even if they’re not in the database (heuristics).
And of course, it’d be very important that the system lets you see how close the package is to being done building (ie, a progress bar). And an optional file that gives approximate build times (in a format which can be adjusted to your machine) so that users know how long the build will take.
As little as 5 years ago this would have been painfully slow. But I think that today adding a dozen packages can take less than a half hour in most cases and that’s fine to install things. And you can still keep binary packages ( and you should) for as many libraries as possible in a central repository: DON’T JUST KEEP THE LIBRARIES YOU NEED FOR THE DEFAULT APPLICATIONS YOU INSTALLED!
Source management is surely the long-term solution for all free software systems. However, I disagree with your approach. Modern computers are pretty fast, but not fast enough to hide the build time for many packages, let alone a big update. An emerge -e world on a modern Gentoo desktop will take a good 3-5 hours.
Another point to note is that compilation performance isn’t going to scale incredibly well given current trends in CPU architecture. Compilation is very serial and conditional in nature. It’s a very good pipeline benchmark for this reason, but a poor fit for increasingly multi-threaded platforms. There’s a limit to how well you can parallelize compilation before the threads start to block on each other.
Further, a lot of the features you describe are damn hard to implement for fundamental reasons. Don’t you think somebody would have done an ASCII progress bar for make over a decade ago if this was easy? Build systems just aren’t designed to be able to predict how much work is left. They are like a state machine, hopping from task to task until they happen to reach the end state. The best I can imagine is a rough estimate based on a few calibration runs (on various classes of machines) and your machine’s BogoMips score.
I don’t even know why a progress bar is that useful. The build will finish eventually, just go do something else in the meantime! There should be a progress indicator, like an animated icon or whatever to confirm it’s still going. But I think that a rough estimate, such as that a given package should take 10-20 minutes to build on your system, is the best we’re going to get.
No next-gen build system is going to be based on Autotools. That stack is a POS. As for having a nice GUI that lets you configure a build, it’s called CMake.
Distributors should have a way to commit any distro-specific build configurations or scripts to the upstream source tree. This way upstream developers can build and host distro-specific packages, keep build configs in sync with their changes, and/or submit build bugs to distributors. It also provides a central location for all distros’ build configurations for a given package, which will help distributors collaborate and share.
Finally, source distributions don’t have to be so bleeding edge or flexible. By compromising these ideals, distributors can dramatically improve the experience for most users. For example, a distributor could roll a stable, binary GNOME or KDE desktop release every 4-6 months. The user can then update their additional packages from source. This dramatically increases the quality of the base desktop and decreases the time spend compiling updates, even for relatively demanding users. When it comes down to it, about 80% of the packages on a KDE user’s system are on 80% of all KDE users’ systems. Make this 80% a common base and let the users compile the remaining 20%.
Edited 2007-02-22 03:02
Another point to note is that compilation performance isn’t going to scale incredibly well given current trends in CPU architecture. Compilation is very serial and conditional in nature. It’s a very good pipeline benchmark for this reason, but a poor fit for increasingly multi-threaded platforms. There’s a limit to how well you can parallelize compilation before the threads start to block on each other.
All of the initial .o building is completely parallelizable… The rest may take some time.
There’s a very easy way to do the progress bar: You watch how many shells are executed in the build process (for Make) and then to show the progress bar you count them… You might try and add in information about the time of each shell process, but playing with total time would be silly.
This would run into a problem if you have systems where shells are launched in non-preset ways that could vary from system to system. If this is the case you’ll need to look for another method: Maybe you could watch for how many times the compiler is launched? Maybe you could watch for file writes within the source and output directories?
I only state autotools (which I refuse to use, because yes it’s awful) because _everyone is using it_ and for your system to be viable it needs to be useful today.
I’ve been saying for a long time that distros need some kind of standardization on this stuff, but then people swear up and down that package installation on Linux is not a problem and doesn’t need to be fixed.
This article and some of the comments here seem to suggest otherwise.
I’ve been saying for a long time that distros need some kind of standardization on this stuff, but then people swear up and down that package installation on Linux is not a problem and doesn’t need to be fixed.
Package installation on Linux, within the context of maintaining the distribution itself, is not too much of a problem on distros that know how. Red Hat have royally screwed their RPM implementation with Yum, and Novell saw fit to go off and create something incredibly slow and stupid written in Mono to replace YaST for some reason.
However, what is a problem on Linux is installing, and especially upgrading, a lot of third-party software. Trying to update things like Ruby or Bacula to newer versions that didn’t come as part of your distro is a royal pain.
There is no decent package management system such as apt for FreeBSD. One reason why I don’t use FreeBSD. Ports sometimes work, sometimes they don’t. And yes, I’ve tried Gentoo, and I think it’s awful. I don’t want to compile my packages for a fraction of more speed. Simply useless and a waste of time.
The other reason why I don’t use FreeBSD is it does not have any journaling filesystem and soft updates are not – I repeat: are not – an equal substitution. Maybe in the future we’ll see zfs, but at the moment there isn’t anything there.
The third reason – actually quite important – is: FreeBSD does not have the userbase Linux has. It means less software and less help from the community.
Although I do feel it’s slow, other than that I’ve never had a problem with YUM, in fact I’ve had more headaches under synaptic than I ever had with yum (CLI not yumex), although I’ve only used apt-get itself a few times so can’t make a fair comparison.
Fedora is awful.
Out of all the “mainstream” distro’s, I find it the most infuriating to use.
“””
Fedora is awful.
Out of all the “mainstream” distro’s, I find it the most infuriating to use.
“””
I’ve found that I think of Fedora as my “home”.
I started out with Slackware ’96 way back in December 1996. I switched to Redhat 4.2 in April 1997.
I obliterated Windows from my home machine later that year, and had a short stint with Mandrake a couple of years later.
When RH8 came out with a new focus on the desktop, I moved back to RH.
I migrated to FC back when it was still called “The RedHat Linux Project”, moved some servers to CentOS last year, and now use a blend of CentOS and Fedora at my client sites.
Last summer, I (a card carrying Debian detractor) tried Ubuntu, and liked it enough that I have stayed with it.
Well, that is not quite correct. I want to move my personal desktop back to Fedora. But I have a lot of data, and when I set up the Ubuntu I did an LVM logical volume across 2 drives, and don’t have the extra space to copy everything over to preserve across the new installation. So even though I like Ubuntu, I feel a bit trapped.
Ubuntu’s package availability is great. But it’s like being stuck in a really nice nice hotel room.
It doesn’t feel like home.
I have, upon occasion, been accused of trolling against Fedora right here at OSAlert. And maybe my accusers were right. Maybe we only troll against the things we care about.
But when you get right down to it, you can take the boy out of Fedora… but you can’t take the Fedora out of the boy.
Edited 2007-02-21 17:51
Exactly same feeling here.
Difference being that I didn’t go for Ubuntu, I’m putting up with the minor glitches on the Fedora way, knowing the grass ain’t really that greener elsewhere.
This loyalty thing may seem irrelevant, but it’s not.
As for “ESR”, well.. I don’t take people that are for the war in Iraq seriously anymore.
I was exactly in the same position as you, a few months ago. I had been using Ubuntu for a long time (couple of years) and was happy with it, but when I tried to upgrade from Dapper to Edgy, things went awfully wrong, so I got disapointed and decided to give Fedora Core 6 a try.
It was great right after install, especially that the whole 3D desktop (compiz+aiglx) was automatically installed. Wasn’t so great for Wifi and Video cards etc tho… It took me less than a week to get frustrated with Fedora and Its various flaws and workarounds that are not needed under Ubuntu. So I have then decided to get back to Ubuntu with a clean install of Edgy Eft. Smooth install, 3D wasn’t installed by default but at least the wifi, video card and all were all working great right away. And installing beryl is a no brainer anwyay!
I’m now sticking with Ubuntu. It just works! You should really test Fedora on a spare machine before you do the move!!
Amen, Reverend!
re:-‘#No surprise
By nicholas (1.53) on 2007-02-21 17:19:22 UTC
Fedora is awful.
Out of all the “mainstream” distro’s, I find it the most infuriating to use.”
Fedora is NOT awful, Fedora is GREAT.
Just because you don’t like it, or cannot understand how to use it does NOT mean that it is awful.
I run my webserver on Fedora and have done since FCR1, currently I’m at FCR5 and will move that to 6 when 7 comes out.
Just because ESR (whoever he is, yes I looked at the wiki, and no I’m none the wiser) doesn’t like it doesn’t mean that YOU or any of you don’t have to like it. Bugs happen in Fedora. They then usually get fixed (quickly).
Show me a distro that doesn’t have bugs.
Oh and here’s an article I wrote about my favorite distro,
http://linux-noob.com/review/fedora/fcrh/
The evolution of Fedora Core linux (i should update it I know)
(running on Fedora)
cheers
anyweb (fedora supporter !)
Edited 2007-02-21 19:29
I didn’t care much for Fedora either, but it’s all a matter of opinion. If Fedora sucked horribly bad nobody would use it at all and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
I, personally, have never had to many problems with RPM based distros. I’m sure it’s because I don’t do much with Linux like other do, but all the same my experience hasn’t been all that bad.
The thing I wish would happen is that all distros would settle on one way to package files. Doesn’t mean they have to deliver the packages the same way though.
I also wish that developers could simply develop one binary version for all Linux distros or something like that.
“Just because you don’t like it, or cannot understand how to use it does NOT mean that it is awful. ”
Imbecile.
Just because you think something is great, doesn’t mean it is.
Ever heard of personal choice?
I personally find it infuriating to use. I have also been using Linux since 1995, and UNIX since 1992.
I don’t like it, that doesn’t mean you have to dislike it too.
That’s the last thing the Ubuntu community needs — ESR as a user!
/* That’s the last thing the Ubuntu community needs — ESR as a user! */
LOL,you guys can keep him, what a relief it was he did not decide to become a Gentoo Linux user.
Edited 2007-02-22 04:41
This must be the 3rd time ESR is “leaving” the Fedora community.
If I was a Ubuntu user, I’d start shaking in my boots…
– Gilboa
Actually I beg to differ…He’ll discover the simplicity of apt-get install and never look back…Or he can stick to Redhat and try apt4rpm.
Seriously, why does it matter what distro he uses?
Check this out from his wikepedia entry: Raymond identifies himself religiously as a neopagan, and is an initiate witch and coven leader. I don’t trust anyone who believes in witches and fairy tales to tell me anything about computers. Particularly those that also just talk and don’t code.
You hit the nail on the head, I was a little to scared to be that blunt about it. But you’re right. who cares?
Damn. That’s just scary. Thanks for the “heads up”.
Yes, ESR is a weird person. And I totally disagree with him on fireguns (he call’s himself a “gun nut”). But some of his texts are actually very good, see the for example “A Brief History of Hackerdom” in O’Reillys open book “Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution”, downloadable from http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html
And to be fair: He does not talk only – he has contributed code as well, see http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html
“””
And to be fair: He does not talk only – he has contributed code as well
“””
Contributed? He waltzes in, declares himself more experienced than the young dunderheads in charge, and starts trying to force code down the project’s throat.
This is best demonstrated by doing a postmortem of those places where he has failed.
Search LKML for CLM2.
Watch how he sweeps in.
Watch how he condescends to the other, lesser, kernel hackers.
Watch how, in desperation, he does an end run around the normal process and tries to lobby Linus Torvalds in private.
And watch as his ill-conceived project, and he himself, is ejected from kernel development.
I watched the whole thing.
One day, I even plan to paint a representation:
“Eric Raymond’s Expulsion From Paradise”
I’m not a great artist. So don’t expect too much.
The Sistine Chapel’s reputation is probably safe for now.
But OSS has grown far past the point where ESR is a major player.
If only he could grok that.
Edited 2007-02-21 18:18
I witnessed the CLM2 escapade as well. It was ugly. ESR’s claims to be an “über kode god” are vastly overstated.
Distro tastes are terribly subjective and always will be. What works for me may not work for you. And vice versa. But is that any big deal? I don’t think it is.
ESR’s weird, narcissistic belief that his distro choice is somehow worthy of attention is just scary.
“””
Watch how, in desperation, he does an end run around the normal process…
“””
I wonder if this “news item” is a cry for attention, or yet another attempt to do an end-run around the normal process.
“Yes, ESR is a weird person. And I totally disagree with him on fireguns (he call’s himself a “gun nut”)”
————
Guns don’t kill people rappers do.
Neopagan? ROFL
And yet you probably believe in an invisible man in the clouds, people with wings and another man with horns. Christianity is no less absurd than paganism.
“And yet you probably believe in an invisible man in the clouds, people with wings and another man with horns. Christianity is no less absurd than paganism.”
Thank you! Besides, why should ones religious preference dictate his worth as it relates to computers.
Another thing: I’d rather listen to someone who is involved in what the majority of the world consider to be weird rather than a bunch of people who do nothing but recite the same old tired scriptures like mindless drones.
bunch of people who do nothing but recite the same old tired scriptures
Truth is like that. It never changes. Whether you get bored by it or not.
“””Truth is like that. It never changes. Whether you get bored by it or not.”””
Personally, I lump Eric’s odd delusions into the same category as I do Christians and anyone else who believes in things based upon absolutely no evidence beyond what they were told in childhood.
I don’t care if you are a programmer or the President of the United States.
Such delusions cost your credibility with me because it reveals some basic things about your thought processes.
I do give Buddhism a break though. I can see where it actually makes a bit of muddled sense if one looks hard enough.
i guess wind does not exist because you can not see it, but maybe wind does exist because bill nye the science guy says the wind exists. anyway, who needs your credibility to have a satisfactory relationship with a religion.
“””
i guess wind does not exist because you can not see it, but maybe wind does exist because bill nye the science guy says the wind exists. anyway, who needs your credibility to have a satisfactory relationship with a religion.
“””
What a stupid example.
I can read about experiments done with wind. I can reproduce those experiments to see if my results agree with those of others.
I can devise new experiments based upon theory and run them. And I can publish my work and see if others can reproduce the results.
Most importantly, I can, in theory, rule out elements of my wind theory… disproving them through experiment.
In fact, in science, nothing can ever actually be proven. We can only rule out the null hypothesis, strengthening our confidence in the theory. If the theory does not perform, it does not gain confidence. And no element of the theory is ever above being rejected if it fails to agree with experiment.
It’s reproducible. It’s quantifiable.
The believer in a religion thinks differently. The religion is assumed to be true and there is no way to disprove any part of it. At least not from the standpoint of the true believer.
That is why holding such irrational beliefs, in my opinion, hurts the credibility of their holders in other areas which require rational thought.
Watch “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=v3p51MBKMLk
http://youtube.com/watch?v=O_aw1O6nyms
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ussdzdnj_dE
http://youtube.com/watch?v=NZU111Q5ASs
http://youtube.com/watch?v=nZgX4lSy-Mg
Edited 2007-02-21 22:42
In fact, in science, nothing can ever actually be proven. (…). And no element of the theory is ever above being rejected if it fails to agree with experiment.
It’s reproducible. It’s quantifiable.
The believer in a religion thinks differently. The religion is assumed to be true and there is no way to disprove any part of it. At least not from the standpoint of the true believer.
What you mention is an ideal conception of science. In the real world, both science and journalism share the same type of dogmas that critics of religion perceive in religion. The exceptions – religious ánd scientific figures that do understand what things are really about, may be surprisingly refreshing. Think of Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein, who, being truly major scientists, still thought/think it perfectly all right to use a word “God” in certain contexts.
On the other hand, not all religions care about dogma the way Western Protestant Christianity does. For example, in traditional Judaism, the importance of what one “believes to be true” has been much less stressed, and officially, the “truth” is still open for debate in many ways. There is, for example, a traditional rabbi who speaks up for evolution theory. No problem.
http://***philosopher.blogspot.com/2006/09/rabbi-nosson-slifkin-vic…
Of course it is. (And ideal conception.) Scientists are people. But the scientific community comes a lot closer to reaching that ideal than do the political or religious communities.
I am uplifted by Einstein’s use of the word god.
He is one person who did not short change god, as most religious people seem to do.
He gave god full credit. He didn’t try to over-simplify. He did not turn god into a wimpy being who mainly exists to give each and every one of us comfort… and to help in a pinch if we pray to him.
It is almost certain that there does exist something… perhaps some entity… perhaps some consciousness, or perhaps more than one consciousnesses, that set up exact parameters for the “Big Bang” in our Universe… and perhaps even in a multitude or infinity of other Universes.
You know what? When push comes to shove, I, an atheist, actually expect that there does exist something, and perhaps even entities which exist on multiple levels of complexity, which would meet my necessarily simplistic human definition of a god.
But the whole business of praying to God as one would pick up the phone to call one’s attorney is a trivialization of what such wonderous being(s) would have to be.
As to rabbis being able to speak up for evolutionary theory, all I can say is welcome to the 20th century.
Edited 2007-02-21 23:15
Of course it is. (And ideal conception.) Scientists are people. But the scientific community comes a lot closer to reaching that ideal than do the political or religious communities.
I am not sure.
It takes a lot of courage sometimes to stand up for what you are convinced of are facts, or way more valid hypotheses than what is commonly accepted, in certain times and places. The economic science, for example, is completely stuffed with dogmas and creeds. So is the medical science (and the horrors and blunders that are, and have been, performed in the name of it, are numerous). Islamology, too, is an example of an extremely political field of study.
Even physics or engineering are not immune to crazy creeds. Even if the scientists themselves don’t believe what they say, they may serve their overlords that threaten to cut their budgets if they don’t say it (I might mention the outrageous “progressive collapse” theories regarding WTC 1 and 2 on 01/9/11 – well, enough about that).
It is simply extremely difficult to stay true to your supposed ideals when politics, power and money are involved.
“””
It is simply extremely difficult to stay true to your supposed ideals when politics, power and money are involved.
“””
I’ll stand by my original statement.
The scientific community, as human beings, come closer to realizing the goal of embracing truth than groups who, from the outset, embrace faith.
This is an imperfect world. But at least the scientific community embraces the concept of sanity and reason.
OT
“The scientific community, as human beings, come closer to realizing the goal of embracing truth than groups who, from the outset, embrace faith.
This is an imperfect world. But at least the scientific community embraces the concept of sanity and reason.”
I take it you are unaware of the scientific advances made by Muslims before the Ummah got all fscked up and wahabbi-esque?
Advances made *only* because it is incumbent on ALL Muslims to investigate the universe and to continuously increase their knowledge of all things?
/OT
“””
“The scientific community, as human beings, come closer to realizing the goal of embracing truth than groups who, from the outset, embrace faith.
This is an imperfect world. But at least the scientific community embraces the concept of sanity and reason.”
I take it you are unaware of the scientific advances made by Muslims before the Ummah got all fscked up and wahabbi-esque?
Advances made *only* because it is incumbent on ALL Muslims to investigate the universe and to continuously increase their knowledge of all things?
“””
That sounds quite cool. I would appreciate more details.
In the past, there was little that could *not* be associated to some religion.
Even the Catholic Church can lay claim to scientific discovery. Never mind what they tried, and are still trying, to this day, to bury.
Intelligent Design, anyone?
At least we (a lot of us, anyway) can’t be placed under house arrest anymore.
“That sounds quite cool. I would appreciate more details. ”
Some info here:
http://www.al-bab.com/arab/science.htm
http://www.muslimheritage.com/
Though this is waaaaaaaaaay OT now.
you use a lot of words, but i can’t seem to find any substance. what a stupid response you give in saying wind is a stupid example. i don’t want to watch the god delusion, i prefer something more like my dream theater or rush dvds, even spongebob squarepants is more realistic than you.
“””
you use a lot of words, but i can’t seem to find any substance. what a stupid response you give in saying wind is a stupid example. i don’t want to watch the god delusion, i prefer something more like my dream theater or rush dvds, even spongebob squarepants is more realistic than you.
“””
Well, you might be best to stick to Spongebob. It seems more on your level of comprehension.
But I am reviewing Richard Dawkins’ documentary now. You would seem to be in it in quite a few places.
And you might want to watch, if only to stay informed… if you care about that sort thing.
Edited 2007-02-21 23:56
There’s actually a difference between non-rational and irrational. Axioms are non-rational. Science has plenty. For instance, science asserts:
(1) The laws of the universe are uniform throughout space.
(2) The laws of the universe don’t vary with time.
(3) The universe wasn’t created last thursday ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism ) and we are in a version of the Matrix.
There is no way to prove any of these basic axioms, but without them we can’t prove anything meaningful and they haven’t let us down so far (unless (3) is true!), so we have faith in them.
The key difference between *rational* religious and *rational* non-religious people is that they have slightly different axioms (theists add the “god exists”, spiritualists add the “our souls survive death even though there is no god” axiom, atheists add the “god doesn’t exist” axiom, agnostics add the “god’s existence is unknowable” or “it doesn’t affect how I live so I won’t have a God axiom” axioms). If there’s a problem with one of the axioms (e.g. Euclid’s fifth postulate), they’re willing to update the axiom or drop it all together .
Unfortunately, Godel’s theorem proves that in reality there are things that are true, but not provable, so we may never know the answer of God’s existence. I honestly, don’t believe it’s possible to know. If God came down right now and was able to do anything you asked him to, there would be no way to know he was some technology that we’re unaware of or if it’s all a delusion. IMO, there isn’t a single test that could validate or invalidate God’s existence (even if God were right in front of you and was eager to prove himself to you).
Anyway, this has little to do with ESR’s criticisms of Fedora, so here’s my take as an SLS to Slackware to Red Hat to Fedora to Ubuntu user. From what I’ve read, RPMs and DEBs have almost the same features these days, so it’s not an RPM versus DEB issue so much as an RPM repository versus DEB repository issue.
From my experience, if you stick to the core packages, Fedora is quite good (if you ignore yum’s speed) and won’t have any major issues. The problem is, most Fedora desktop users go outside the official packages for at least some (mostly multimedia) applications or for newer versions of existing packages (more than a few Fedora packages were ancient when I was using it). Non-official package maintainers don’t seem to take as much care in either not duplicating core functionality (i.e. replacing packages with newer versions when they don’t have to) or specifying core packages properly (e.g. not using RPM’s features fully or properly). This can really mess things up, so you end up with RPM hell.
With Ubuntu, I found things are different. There’s little version duplication (the PLF repositories explicitly avoid it) and packages tend to have better spec files (not sure why) and packages tend to be up to date (since they piggy back off of Debian’s stabilized unstable branch), so there’s little chance of DEB hell and if it does happen (I’ve gotten bitten during the Warty to Hoary upgrade), it’s usually pretty easy to fix broken packages and return to a sane system.
Edited 2007-02-21 23:56
“””
The key difference between *rational* religious and *rational* non-religious people is that they have slightly different axioms (theists add the “god exists”, spiritualists add the “our souls survive death even though there is no god” axiom, atheists add the “god doesn’t exist” axiom, agnostics add the “god’s existence is unknowable” or “it doesn’t affect how I live so I won’t have a God axiom” axioms). If there’s a problem with one of the axioms (e.g. Euclid’s fifth postulate), they’re willing to update the axiom or drop it all together .
“””
You correctly point out that the existence of a god or gods is outside the province of science.
But that ignores the more important question.
The existence… or not… of a god or gods does not really affect our world that much.
What really matters is people’s perception that some god affects our lives on a daily basis and watches what we do.
This is very much in the domain of the testable.
The idea that God might reward or punish us based upon what we do has profound implications for all of us.
If God, Allah, or whomever the affected individual was taught to believe in from childhood “tells” him or her to hijack a plane and fly it into a building, and they do it, that is a lot more relevant than any dry rehash of Godel.
I sometimes think that the question of whether a god or gods exists, cerebral as it may seem, is a red herring and does at least as much damage as the belief that some god is watching us and telling us what to do. Or, at least, that question fails to avert the damage by distracting attention from the real problem.
The real problem is the belief that god is, in essence, our boss, and we must perform for him in order to get ahead.
A sincere apology to my fellow OSAlert subscribers for the off-topic thread. But I do think it important to speak out upon this topic.
I hope I have not worn out my welcome. And I’ll try to wind this down.
Edited 2007-02-22 00:57
There’s actually a difference between non-rational and irrational. Axioms are non-rational. Science has plenty. For instance, science asserts:
(1) The laws of the universe are uniform throughout space.
(2) The laws of the universe don’t vary with time.
(3) The universe wasn’t created last thursday ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism ) and we are in a version of the Matrix.
Actually, science asserts none of those things. Cosmologists routinely perform tests to see if they can find errors in 1 or 2.
And yet christianity does not have an invisible man in the clouds, people with wings or another man with horns.
Of course it has a man swallowed by a large fish who gets spat out and lives , a donkey that rebukes, etc. But those are hardly central.
Of course [Christianity] has a man swallowed by a large fish who gets spat out and lives , a donkey that rebukes, etc. But those are hardly central.
I’m not christian, but I believe Jona was swallowed by a whale, not a fish. Or perhaps you were thinking of another passage in the holy book?
>>Of course [Christianity] has a man swallowed by a large fish who gets spat out and lives , a donkey that rebukes, etc. But those are hardly central.
>I’m not christian, but I believe Jona was swallowed by a whale, not a fish. Or perhaps you were thinking of another passage in the holy book?
The Hebrew original: dag gadol, a big fish.
> The Hebrew original: dag gadol, a big fish.
I stand corrected. Newest entry on my todo list: learn Hebrew!
The man with the horns? I believe I’ve seen here: http://www.freebsd.org/
He does exist
That’s not a man; it’s a daemon, and yes, I agree, they do exist (and not just in my head).
Sorry. I’ll try harder not to be blasphemous (if that is a word)
“””
Sorry. I’ll try harder not to be blasphemous (if that is a word)
“””
“Blasphemous” is a perfectly good word.
We should do it more often.
I propose that OSAlert declare each Wednesday to be “Blasphemy Day”.
Edited 2007-02-22 01:56
Haha.. you are being mean to me… my stomach hurts now, and it’s your fault
But good idea though – some things shouldn’t be taken too seriously
(As long as you don’t make fun of 42 and Monty Python)
“””Haha.. you are being mean to me…”””
Yes.
“””my stomach hurts now, and it’s your fault
“””
No. That’s God’s fault. Don’t blame me.
No. That’s God’s fault. Don’t blame me.
Typical. You non-believers always hide being a Deity in order to get rid of your responsibilities
I’m a free thinker. So that’s ${Deity} to you!.
Neither I nor any of the Christians I know believe in any of those things. You might want to read up a bit before spouting nonsense.
Neither I nor any of the Christians I know believe in any of those things. You might want to read up a bit before spouting nonsense.
I’m willing to bet though that you believe that a couple of thousand years ago a guy was around who had a virgin for a mum, could walk on water, could turn water into wine, could magically heal the sick, and could feed 5000 people with a couple of loaves of bread and some fish.
Based on what evidence, exactly?
Edited 2007-02-21 23:24
Hahaha… Even though I was raised as a Christian, I know what you mean. I guess that faith is just like this: you have to accept it the way it is. I do believe in what you said despite the lack of evidences.
But I truly understand that, to an atheist, this is gibberish as I too tend to prefer logical and rational explanations to everything to the point that I modded up all those funny comparisons that people brought before. Is just that is hard to argue against my faith. That's all.
“Neither I nor any of the Christians I know believe in any of those things. ”
But you do believe he is God.
Which is wrong.
“Neither I nor any of the Christians I know believe in any of those things.”
Really? I was under the distinct impression that most Christians do indeed believe in God, the Devil, Heaven and Hell. Perhaps not in those exact visual representations alluded to here but they are pretty core concepts to Christianity.
Your impressions are right. Most Christians believe there are angels floating around everywhere, a devil, heaven, hell, etc.
That does not mean that all Christians believe something – I’d venture a guess and say that a shocking number of Christians don’t fit common stereotypes.
This coming from a radical blasphemous somewhat ex Christian dabbling in Quaker/UU territory.
The visual representations offered are so wrong and irrelevant that saying that they in any way allude to anything connected to core Christian beliefs is just not true. Nobody I know believes that God has a beard and lives in the sky.
“Nobody I know believes that God has a beard and lives in the sky.”
Really? I could have sworn that EVERY Christian I know thinks Jesus is God and he also ascended up into the sky.
I’ve never seen an artists depiction of him without a beard either.
Ascended to heaven != lives in the sky.
Most artist depictions also show him as a white dude. Artist depictions are just that, and I’ll bet that none of them really honestly think they know what jesus looked like. And any way what jesus looked like while alive has no bearing to what God looks like.
“And any way what jesus looked like while alive has no bearing to what God looks like.”
Indeed, it is true that no one knows what God even *is* let alone looks like.
The arrogance and weakness of man is displayed in his anthropomorphism of the almighty.
“I don’t trust anyone who believes in witches and fairy tales to tell me anything about computers.”
What’s scary is the number of people who believe in some all-powerful invisible entity that lives in a golden city in the sky surrounded by the souls of every single person in existence who died and a host of other winged people. Oh wait…a lot of the people who died went to that other fiery place because he did something like really satanic like marry someone of the same sex or rip up a picture of the pope on television.
Judgemental people with no common sense make me sick.
There must be a way to mod shockingly insightful comments past +5, right?
No?
Well, there should be…
Neo pagans are more open minded than most Christian, Muslims or *** zealots. They don’t try to convert the whole world either. They are more respectfull of life and they don’t wage religious wars, murder each other about interpretations of the Bible or the Koran. They even don’t even wage wars in Iraq because they think God told them to do so….
In other words, don’t worry too much about his religious backgroud.
Neo pagans (…) don’t even wage wars in Iraq because they think God told them to do so….
Who wage wars in Iraq because God told them so, then?
“Check this out from his wikepedia entry: Raymond identifies himself religiously as a neopagan, and is an initiate witch and coven leader. I don’t trust anyone who believes in witches and fairy tales to tell me anything about computers. Particularly those that also just talk and don’t code.“
Well, many people have irrational beliefs and superstitions. Some people believe in witches and spirits and magic, some in fairies, some in fictitious almighty gods that created the earth 6000 years ago, some in Jesus’ magic tricks, and some Moses’ telekinetic powers, and much more.
I only wished everyone could think with step by step reasoning.
Just wait until AI comes along to imitate us…
How does this relate to Fedora sucking. If you are going to judge a persons Point of View on Subject A because you disagree with his Point of View on unrelated Subject B. You are being quite stupid. Most people follow some sort of religion. Computers and Operating systems are actually not based in religion, at least most of them. You logic is the same as the people in the middle east. You cant trust that guy because he is not in my religion.
You logic is the same as the people in the middle east. You cant trust that guy because he is not in my religion.
In what sense is that particular to the Middle East?
I might mention Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India (no that is not the Middle East
), Nigeria, …
Check this out from his wikepedia entry: Raymond identifies himself religiously as a neopagan, and is an initiate witch and coven leader. I don’t trust anyone who believes in witches and fairy tales to tell me anything about computers.
I know geeks generally don’t have an emotional detector installed, but I think it is just possible that that might be a bit of a joke.
“I don’t trust anyone who believes in witches and fairy tales to tell me anything about computers.”
I don’t trust anyone who believes in wikipedia to tell me anything about, well, anything.
wow, That’s what I call a loyal user! but in any case, I don’t really enjoy articles like these, They just seem to be argument bait. I do have to say that fedora has not really been all that great since its conception (I think that’s the right word…) this reminds me that I need to give CentOS a shot though.
I think the word you are looking for may be “inception” as opposed to “conception”.
I have felt for a long time that the Debian package system (and associated tools) does a better job of package dependency management. I, too, gave up on Fedora due to the large amount of things that just don’t work. Fedora specialists are quick to tell you the steps necessary to fix whatever the problem is, but I just plain got tired of it. I’ve seen the same thing with Mandriva (so it’s not just community vs. commercial distros). I’ve gone many months waiting for Mandriva to fix a basic bug in its package update system. Meanwhile, they are releasing new versions.
Sometimes enough is enough. Call me a wussy, call me a whiner, just don’t call me!
[takes a deep breath]
Having said all that, I realize nobody’s perfect. I just think RPM is seriously broken and need major upgrade/improvement (which previous articles mention Redhat is setting out to do just that).
Really, I wish they would just chuck it and use debian packages. Would it really be that hard?
What basic bug are you talking about?
The Update Notification for my Mandriva 2007 box (Silver Membership). Last I checked it was still broken. Note, however, that updating is not broken, but I don’t like having to manually check with my server. I like the notification. This may already be fixed, I haven’t checked since early January.
Oh, yeah. That one does suck. I keep being told it’s going to get fixed, and it doesn’t. *sigh*
have you read that thread on the forums about using smart and krandrtray?
No I havent’t.
Do a search for ksmarttray and you should find it. It’s a tray applet notification thingy for smart, so if you set up smart with an updates source and then use ksmarttray, you get the same basic functionality as Online.
I will do just that. Thanks!
The Update Notification for my Mandriva 2007 box (Silver Membership). Last I checked it was still broken. Note, however, that updating is not broken, but I don’t like having to manually check with my server. I like the notification. This may already be fixed, I haven’t checked since early January.
Which has:
A. Nothing to do with Fedora. (I know you’re talking about RPM… but in general)
B. Nothing to do with RPM. (RPM does not handle updates – yum/apt/etc do)
– Gilboa
Edited 2007-02-22 11:23
<em>I just think RPM is seriously broken and need major upgrade/improvement (which previous articles mention Redhat is setting out to do just that).</em>
You’re more than welcome to stop by the #rpm channel on irc.freenode.net and talk with the live and very active developers of rpm to discuss what you think is broken and what they’re doing about it.
Paches welcome.
Thank you for a sane post.
FWIW: I gave on all redhat based distros about 4 years ago for just that reason. I now use debian.
Debian has it’s problems also. But, in my opinion, debian’s package management is so superior to redhat’s that dealing with debian’s warts are well worth it.
Red Hat/Fedora have become “more disconnected from the technical and evangelical challenges that must be met to make Linux a world-changing success that liberates a majority of computer users” [ESR, section bolded by me] by narrow-mindedly insisting on free software?
I wonder, do I have the obligation to liberate others, even against their will? And how do we liberate computer users by embracing proprietary interfaces and codecs? Questions, questions…
Although the man is insane, he is right about fedora being a disaster in terms of package management. I use fedora at work (it’s an imposed choice) and every time I run “sudo yum update”, I get nervous. Especially when I see a new kernel (because I know I wont be able to just vmware-config.pl without needing a patch or something).
Fedora isn’t bleeding-edge…its just bleeding
Fedora isn’t bleeding-edge…its just bleeding
Thanks. You just made my day
The vmware vmnet problems would most likely apply to all distros that uses the late versions of the Linux kernel, so this is not really a Fedora problem. This really is a bleeding-edge problem.
Agreed.
Moreover, In your particular case I would blame the company policy for your problems: if they rely on 3rd party kernel modules, either they hire kernel hackers _exclusively_, so they can fix the inevitable problems each kernel update will raise, or give up to a more “static” distribution.
To this end, if the key point about the Fedora choice is the price, I’d suggest you give a serious look a CentOS
The vmware vmnet problems would most likely apply to all distros that uses the late versions of the Linux kernel, so this is not really a Fedora problem. This really is a bleeding-edge problem.
Yes and no, on my gentoo box (2.6.20 kernel) i had no problems installing vmware-workstation.Because the package manager automagically loads patches and additional stuff needed for a successfull install.
Fedoras problem is a inferior repository (management).
Argh!
<Had enough of clueless comments for one day>
This has nothing, and let me reiterate myself, -nothing- to do with RPM. It has nothing, and let me repeat myself yet again, -nothing- to do with Fedora.
Heck, it has nothing, and I do mean -nothing- to do with any-type-of-distro-specific kernel.
Your problem is with VMWare and VMWare only. VMWare doesn’t support upstream kernels. It never did. Period.
Please, for the love of God, get a clue before you post such obvious FUD. *
BTW, I’m having the same problem with Debian Eth guest machine – should I
blame Debian for that?
Now, unless you have anything tangible about RPM to add (E.g. rpm -Uvh on package X causes problem Y; yum update with set of package X caused dependency problem Y)
<Had enough of clueless comments for one day>
If you have any shred of common decency, I fully expect you to edit/correct your original comment.
– Gilboa
* You have every right to dislike X (Fedora in this case) – you do not have right (IMO) to spread wrong and unfounded claims against X.
Edited 2007-02-22 11:35
You are so angry. Chillax.
I’ve used Red Hat in the past and got problems with RPM that borked my install too. But as a Debian user I’ve also had problems with some packages that made me uninstall and reinstall a lot of other dependencies to satisfy the package manager. It can happen. I don’t think that is a reason to leave for another distro. Packagers and developers are humans, and we humans make mistakes. If it happened all the time, then I would surely agree.
But this is not the main problem, as he cites political and technical problems.
Also, being RPM not statically linked is not a problem if you uninstall some library it depends on. Just boot with your recovery CD and manually unpack the library. Problem solved in 5 minutes. So “be unrecoverably screwed” is a bit too much. I don’t buy it. I smell this whole RPM problem he had is a “chivo expiatorio” (don’t know the english for this, sorry).
I don’t know what “chivo expiatorio” is, but I would agree that there is a hint of personal agenda in all of this. I do share some of ESR sentiments about Fedora and its instability, but I found myself wondering if something else may have “pushed” ESR in this direction.
Also, feelings aside, I believe Redhat and the Fedora developers to be a great bunch. I hope the whole issue of “dependency hell” can be improved in the RPM world, and yes, even in the Debian world.
However, there may be no quick solution to this, other than not trying to live on the bleeding edge. I remember a long time ago I was complaining about something on my Linux box, and a friend told me, “You’ve been hanging out at Freshmeat.net too much!”
He had a point.
“I don’t know what “chivo expiatorio” is”
Ok, I found it is translated as “scapegoat”.
OSAlert is **not** a reference dictionary.
Yes, scapegoat.
“I don’t know what “chivo expiatorio” is”
Ok, I found it is translated as “scapegoat”.
We have a similar term in portuguese and now seeing it translated, I realized that it means the same thing: “bode expiatório”. I was thinking of that when I read your first comment.
… One thing. So-called-dependency hell is yum related – not RPM related.
(Neither RPM not DEB resolve dependencies – it is up to yum/apt)
– Gilboa
oh my, aren’t we unhappy.
Lol! I don’t know why you where voted down but I voted you back up for the sheer comedy value.
Thanks, made my 5 mins.
I have been a loyal Fedora user for a long time.
But sometimes things just go too far. The recent mmap
corruption bug affected rpm severely and caused corrupt rpm databases. Lots of people duly posted
bugreports on redhat bugzilla. But there was never any encouraging reply from Fedora developers that they knew what the problem was.
The bug is now fixed but I assume Fedora lost quite a few users there.
ESR does not mention his financial interest in a Red Hat competitor, Linspire. He does not mention his real dispute with Fedora (and his reason for aligning with Linspire): his eagerness to abandon open source principles in favor of an unprincipled effort to gain market share, even it it means returning to a world of EULAs and DRM that the rest of us chose Linux to escape from.
Yes, there are problems with yum/RPM, but I suspect that Eric’s main problem is that he has an unorganized collection of RPMs downloaded from random places and has made a mess of his database.
I always suspected an evil masterplan from fedora to sabotage ubuntu, after it rised straight to #1 distribution.
Now they showed their ugly face: They unleashed the ESR on the ubuntu crowd! What a black villany.
I dumped Fedora in January/February 2005, switched to LinuxFromScratch and then to Gentoo later same year.
Updating or upgrading anything on Fedora tends to break the system leading to situations like the one ESR encountered. I left Fedora for the exact same reasons.
<em>Updating or upgrading anything on Fedora tends to break the system leading to situations like the one ESR encountered. I left Fedora for the exact same reasons.</em>
Funny, I did upgrade-installs from FC1 through FC4 including all the interim package updates (I did NOT try and distro-upgrade through rpm. foolishness at best.) and had so few problems it was astonishing. Nothing out of the ordinary that anyone having used linux for a while hasn’t encountered many times over the years.
At FC5 I installed from scratch onto a brand new 250G SATA drive, breaking the chain, but again, updating packages? no problem. repos from Extras, Livna, Dag ? no problem.
not sure what you were doing with yours but chances are it’s you who broke it; not rpm, not yum, you.
YMMV. as always. *shrug*
Well, all I did to break it was to put in the FC3 install CD and let it upgrade the packages. SLAM! – then I spent several weeks (because of slow repositories, missing reposotires etc.) on unbreaking it. After 3 weeks and some things still didn’t work, I decided to dump it for LFS. And that worked fine. I’ve never had issues with Gentoo apart from using the unstable GCC
And of course – don’t forget conflicting dependencies that apt-get/synaptic couldn’t solve. SmartPM made miracles, but not enough. Perhaps I should’ve used SmartPM to upgrade the system, rather than the install-cd’s and Synaptic.
Yum, apt-get, and rpm have serious issues due to the package formats. On gentoo I don’t have such problems – OTOH I’ve got looooong compile times
(OpenOffice is a nice 10-11 hour marathon).
It has been reported that ESR has joined the board of Microsoft is now proudly marketing Windows Vista a truly embracing open-source software:
“I was able to OPEN the package, and the SOURCE of the Software was Microsoft. All very clear and open!”
;}
What’s that?
There’s something called slackware out there. With that you get what you pay for (well much more) and you get used to taking nothing for granted (which is the opposite of what RH/F leads you into).
Ah, configure make install.
And if it does not work, it is usually **their** problem, I’ve got other things to do.
What was he doing so special? Trying to run the Messenger?
*tongue in cheek* ESR had better be careful, Linus might submit some patches as a protest to his decision.
Seriously, what was the last great Red Hat release? I’ve been sticking with Fedora just because I haven’t had the time to install any other distro yet.
> Seriously, what was the last great Red Hat release?
FC6 : http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC6ReleaseSummary
Lost interest in RedHat a long time ago. RPM just blew chunks and made the experience very tedious.
Then again, it has taken until this year to get recently serious about using Linux on the desktop and I’m afraid it’s
Drum Roll
Ubuntu.
By great, I meant “useful”. I’d probably say RH 9. Or maybe even 7…
One of the major advantages (theoretically) of open source projects is its ability to evolve and adopt the better technology.
No doubt that Red Hat’s package manager was a pioneer attempt to solve linux user’s woes of installing,removing and managing various packages. but but but….when apt-get tool from debian community was available, why Red Hat and other rpm based Giants held to their ego and wasted an oppurtunity to sail ahead.
Technology wise speaking, linux adopts the best methods, but when it comes to issues like package management, companies and communities act as if they are without common sense. Just like kids holding to their whims.
Even now, package management is yet to address an offline upgradation. that is, if updates are available as a single downloadable entity satisfying necessary dependencies, a single click should ensure that all the packages can be installed out of a media like CD of DVD. Even apt-get of debian lags light years behind in implementing this idea. They cannot even imagine a world without internet. A place like university/corporate office where there are hundred computers in a network, an update like “SERVICE PACK” (eeeks! it sounds windowish but practical) from CD/DVD will be saving time and bandwidth. Many computer magazines can also easily provide these updates in their CDS. Why waste bandwith if we can save it.
It is natural that rpm with its inherent disadvantages will loose its way to better package management. Sadly, an intelligent personality like ERS took 13 years to figure out these discrepencies. I hope that he, instead of wasting his time making rpm better with his brand image, promote the core idea,
“THE IDEA THAT ADVANTAGE OF FOSS LIES IN ADAPTING TO THE BETTER AND PROVEN TECHNOLOGY/METHOD AS WELL AS DISCARDING THE OLDER INEFFICIENT ONE”
We can always fork the new and better technology/methods to suit our needs or imagination.
s/loose/lose/
I’ve “gone off” ESR before now for reasons which I shan’t go into, but if I hadn’t, then the realization that he has been using FC and now Ubuntu would have prompted me to, insofar as it proves ‘”ESR” does not stand for “Eat your own dogfood.”‘
As he’s a member of the Linspire board, shouldn’t he be using that, and neither FC nor Ubuntu?
Well… since Linspire is going to be based on Ubuntu… help, a spy! ^_^
I had the same troubles that made me switch from Fedora to Ubuntu too. I for one welcome Eric to the Ubuntu user group and hope he enjoys Ubuntu just like I do…
“I for one welcome Eric to the Ubuntu user group”
There may come the day you rue ever having said that…
I spent so many years dealing with Windows’ dependency DLL hell. What a disaster.
And then Linux came in the late 90’s, early Aughts, and so many said that dependency hell wasn’t a problem. Well, here we are again, so many years later.
More and more I think Apple’s done it right, with a simple download, drag into a folder, and you’re done. And it looks like Haiku will take the same route.
A package upgrade renders Eric (RTFM) Raymond’s system unusable? Shocking, indeed, for such a self-proclaimed Linux guru.
I don’t like how they’ve been thrown together with Linspire in that post. Canonical has a commitment to free software, itself.
to many problems with it, every release.
RH EL or any other linux is better than fedora.
RPM is reason why I just ditched opensuse (user of 2 years) for kubuntu, which has been a great transition to deb. I was thinking about switching to xubuntu though. Kde is great but sometime you need something quick and fast. And Kde is not it for me.
A wise guy but Ubuntu instead? :o)
Fedora Core 3 was the linux distro that changed me from a win user to a lin user. It was great. Fedora Core 4, was just nice, but nothing more. And I just tested Fedora core 5, but I don’t like it. And FC6 just looked like FC5.
My next Linux distro was Ubuntu. And I stayed with it.
Don’t you think that if there were a serious bug in recent updates that even one more of us 1000s of Fedora users would have experienced it? O what’s that you say, this was just a lead in to crack on Fedora for not bowing to proprietary software and installing multimedia codecs by default. Get bent, ESR. You’re trolling.
Give Gentoo a try. It takes some time and effort to install
it manually (I could never get the LiveCD to work),
but the emerge package manager that gentoo uses
usually doesn’t give you any grief (at least not as much as
Debian). Also, the forums on gentoo’s website usually
have solutions to the many problems one can have with Linux.
Just about every piece of hardware that I have can be recognized
& used with gentoo. I would also recommend AmigaOS4, but
most people don’t have any hardware to run it on
Jim
I doubt this is the first time it happens to him. These problems happen all the time in most distros. There are always dependency problems. What else would you expect from Linux after all? It’s been this way for ten years, and no one is likely to fix it, not even a millionaire company like RH or Novell.
If you’re willing to put in the effort (because there’s inevitably stuff you’re going to want from non-standard repositories or RPM downloads from xyz random site), then Fedora’s a perfectly usable distro.
Heck, I’ve got Fedora Core 2 running OK on a bunch of desktops at work, using the final set of updated “official” RPMs and 149 third-party RPMs I downloaded. All you have to do is to have a test environment (they go on my workstation first for a week before being rolled out automatically to the rest if my machine doesn’t play up during the week) to make sure the RPMs work.
It does mean that the very latest stuff has to be manually tracked (e.g. Firefox 2, Thunderbird 1.5.X, Open Office 2.X and so on) and I bet that’s where ESR ran into trouble – he probably installed an unofficial RPM from somewhere and that borked his system.
I’m thinking of switching the work machines to CentOS 5 in the near future, because although it’s easy enough to update the more important desktop packages manually, it’s much harder to do so for low-level system stuff, especially the kernel (yes, we did build a later kernel for one of our FC2 systems and it was a nightmare to do so, taking several attempts to get the kernel config “just right”).
With CentOS 5, I’ll be freed up worrying about the low-level stuff once and for all and just concentrate on manual updates to the popular desktop packages (because CentOS 5 will “freeze” on an older major release of most of them – you’ll never see Firefox 3 on CentOS 5 for example, despite the 5 years of updates it will receive).
i think that’s a good idea, switching to CentOS – it’s much more suitable for a work environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond
If you believe what it says in Wikipedia this guy is either a genius or stark raving mad.
I’ll admit that after reading that I’m favoring the idea that this guy is simply trying to start a war with Red Hat. However, it’s always easier to believe that someone is crazy, ergo their opinions or views are invalid, than it is to believe that they may be right and it just doesn’t suit you.
I think that it is a great thing that there are so many UNIX like systems. When one gets fed up with one, it is easy to continue with another. One does not have to learn everything from start.
DG
I think ESR has corrupted his system by mixing incomptable repos. Any yum or dependency issues/bugs in Core and Extras get resolved, and systems get fixed in the following updates. Do a quick google and you can see that some third party repos are incompatible with extras. So ESR breaks his system using a non official repo and blames the Fedora Project. Turning his mistake into a distro/package manager flame war. Well Done Eric.
Recently, my totem-xine failed after an upgrade. I spent hours to see why, then I found some fedoraforum.org post about freshrpms’ xinelib being incompatible with livna + extras one. So I had to turn off freshrpms totally. Now I use only livna + extras.
I was also glad to hear that in Fedora 7 there will be no extras – everything will be in one place. Perhaps, no livna, either
hehe, i know you made your comment in jest, but just to clarify for anyone else who might get confused: livna will stick around, they package things that the fedora project can’t or won’t for various reasons.
He should be using RHEL instead of Fedora if he wants “QA”. Community OS’s are based on the good hearted contributions from normal people, which for most of the time are not paid for their services. So what, the repositories weren’t synced when he tried to update. That’s not the fault of the Fedora project. His impatience was destructive in his case
Edited 2007-02-22 00:23
Dependency problems happen with every distro. Somtimes when you mix repo’s bad things happen. I have fubared Ubuntu and Fedora a couple of times doing just that. Gotta love the fact my /home resides on another physical disk!
PS- I have not used Gentoo long enough to fubar it.
I’m really surprised that this thread has gotten this far without anyone mentioning http://geekz.co.uk/lovesraymond/archive/nop-nop-nop-nop-nop
When did OSAlert became a ground for Religious debate?
OTOH, I want to ask, what flavor of Linux is Linus using and also with Stallman (if he is using one?
“””
OTOH, I want to ask, what flavor of Linux is Linus using and also with Stallman (if he is using one?
“””
Richard was using Debian a while back, though he did condemn them for promoting non-free software.
He had his eye upon the Argentinian Ututo-e distro for a bit, which was supposedly less contaminated. But then he found grounds to condemn them, as well. I think they mentioned some non-free software on their website somewhere.
We’re still waiting to hear his pronouncement regarding Nuisance.
Richard is possibly the best example, or at least the most relevant example for subscribers of this site, of how damaging religion can be to an otherwise worthy cause.
Linus has been too busy, recently, trolling the Gnome mailing lists to respond to my query, so I’m afraid I can’t answer that part. Sorry.
Edited 2007-02-22 03:47
Redhat? Do they still exist? Does anyone seriously really use it? I binned the last Redhat CD back at 5.2 and never touched that crap again. “ESR” who the hell calls itself ESR?
I don’t know how many of you actually read the mailing list. Anyways, here is the post where ESR says what went wrong.
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-February/msg0…
If you read the full thread it seems that he was using RAWHIDE repo (in which things and expected to and do break) and in addition, while he was trying to create a package he tried to resolve a package conflict by deleting a package which rpm depended on. This can only be done if he used –force and –nodeps at which point, blaming the distro is not an option.
He manually removed or forced the uninstall of an rpm, did not use a rescue cd to restore his system to a stable state and then proceeded to blame fedora for his woes. This is a quintessential drama queen and he is doing what he does best, creating a lot of noise.
I do feel bad that he switched to Ubuntu though. Now the Ubuntu devs have to deal with him on their mailing lists.
He did something like :
$ rpm -e e2fsprogs-libs
error: Failed dependencies:
libblkid.so.1 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-devel-1.39-7.fc6.i386
libblkid.so.1 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-1.39-7.fc6.i386
libblkid.so.1 is needed by (installed) util-linux-2.13-0.46.fc6.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-devel-1.39-7.fc6.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) rpm-build-4.4.2-32.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) cyrus-sasl-2.1.22-4.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) curl-7.15.5-1.fc6.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) gnome-vfs2-2.16.2-2.fc6.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) vorbis-tools-1.1.1-3.fc6.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) openssl-0.9.8b-8.3.fc6.i686
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) neon-0.25.5-5.1.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) subversion-1.4.2-2.fc6.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) openssh-clients-4.3p2-14.fc6.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) krb5-libs-1.5-13.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) krb5-devel-1.5-13.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) rpm-4.4.2-32.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) gnupg-1.4.6-2.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-1.39-7.fc6.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) openssh-4.3p2-14.fc6.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) samba-common-3.0.24-1.fc6.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) samba-client-3.0.24-1.fc6.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) samba-3.0.24-1.fc6.i386
libcom_err.so.2 is needed by (installed) evolution-data-server-1.8.3-1.fc6.i386
libe2p.so.2 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-devel-1.39-7.fc6.i386
libe2p.so.2 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-1.39-7.fc6.i386
libext2fs.so.2 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-devel-1.39-7.fc6.i386
libext2fs.so.2 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-1.39-7.fc6.i386
libss.so.2 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-devel-1.39-7.fc6.i386
libss.so.2 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-1.39-7.fc6.i386
libuuid.so.1 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-devel-1.39-7.fc6.i386
libuuid.so.1 is needed by (installed) apr-1.2.7-10.i386
libuuid.so.1 is needed by (installed) apr-util-1.2.8-1.fc6.i386
libuuid.so.1 is needed by (installed) cryptsetup-luks-1.0.3-2.1.i386
libuuid.so.1 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-1.39-7.fc6.i386
libuuid.so.1 is needed by (installed) util-linux-2.13-0.46.fc6.i386
e2fsprogs-libs = 1.39-7.fc6 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-devel-1.39-7.fc6.i386
e2fsprogs-libs = 1.39-7.fc6 is needed by (installed) e2fsprogs-1.39-7.fc6.i386
But this does not work as ESR espected and ESR and “–nodeps” option. Next ESR got crazy.
> I don’t know how many of you actually read the mailing list.
I did.
Alan Cox reply :
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-February/msg0…
On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 03:03:50AM -0500, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> * Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with
> any attitude other than blank denial.
That would be because we believe in Free Software and doing the right thing
(a practice you appear to have given up on). Maybe it is time the term
“open source” also did the decent thing and died out with you.
> I’m not expecting Ubuntu to be perfect, but I am now certain it will
> be enough better to compensate me for the fact that I need to learn
> a new set of administration tools.
I’m sure they will be delighted to have you
Alan
—
“That was said by Eric Raymond who belongs to another movement”
– Richard Stallman
I read as well. Unfortunately, ESR has managed to succesfully stir a flamebait on topic that has nothing to do with Fedora issue other than screwing his own system. As a result, lot of back stabbing posts showing they are not better than that rant topic. I find sad ESR used his fame to commit such stupidity. Bravo.
What is ESR doing using Fedora, hasn’t the guy been on Freespire’s “board of directors” for the past six months at least. I’m more curious about why he’s not using the distro he’s a high ranking member of, rather than why he’s not using another.
Edited 2007-02-22 09:26
linux man realizes linux hard to use
I noticed that in two posts, the adjective commonly used with the religion of Judaism, was replaced with ***.
Why on earth did that happen? Or is this some freaky antisemitic hack into the website? Or an attempt to keep Googling nazis away from trolling this website?
The posts are:
RE[2]: Does anyone care? By manix
RE[7]: Does anyone care? (by me)
153 posts of non-stop bashing of ESR – how about this guys; stop bashing and start analysing.
If someone has a problem with Fedora or any other distribution, how about listening to them instead of abusing them to buggery.
But I’m not surprised this has occured; when ever I raise problems I have with Linux, I am abused – its a bit like being the only atheist gay at an evangelical meeting; expecting a lynching anytime soon.
153 posts of non-stop bashing of ESR – how about this guys; stop bashing and start analysing.
Non-stop? BS. People are discussing rpm, yum, etc. Even religion, neo-paganism, what fish ate Jonah, etc.
Read the comments, Kaiwai, not guess’em. Or leave’em.
If this site did polls, it would be interesting to have one asking our opinion about ESR.
We could actually put these: http://tinyurl.com/35exqo
and these: http://tinyurl.com/34wec7
to good use this time.
Credit goes to Thom Holwerda for the links, of course.
Edited 2007-02-22 13:39
Linux, ready for the desktop user at last!
FreeBSD for the win; I’ve had nothing but trouble with Fedora and its craptastic rpm/yum/dependency hell system.
– chrish
The only problems I’ve had with yum + rpm is when repositories (or mirrors) don’t have their packages sync’d up. Sometimes, an updated package requires one or several other updated packages. There could be race conditions when the dependent packages aren’t on the mirrors or the servers, yet. In this regard, I wish that syncing can be done in atomic increments where one atom includes all the packages and their dependencies before, say, a createrepo is executed.
(Sorry for the subject, it relates to a famous (around here) play)
Which package manager is the best is of course an interesting question, but why are we even discussing that? Why is linux stuck in versioning hell?
I’m originally an Amiga man and for all its warts and flaws that can’t be sparkled over, it generally stayed out of dependency and version trouble.
Linux is supposed to be an advanced and up-to-date OS and happily rips out its innards from point release to point release, so what is so hard about this that it doesn’t handle more transparent and automagically? You would have thought that someone made a patch or designed something new that the linux crowd would agree is best-in-class and shows how enterprise ready it is.
Meanwhile I’ll manage with the not perfect, but perfectly manageable AIX at work.