~ sweet ~

La politique anti-crise expliquée aux enfants - L'actu en patates - Blog LeMonde.fr

Si comme moi vous avez déjà eu des soucis avec ebusiness.info et/ou Franck Prime, la suite vous fera sourire :

Les blacklistés ebusiness.info, boycot des salons e-commerce paris & co. Buzzinessman, blog e-commerce

After thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, I reached my limit today, when an attempt to upgrade one (1) 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.

The proximate causes of this failure were (1) incompetent repository maintenance, making any nontrivial upgrade certain to founder on a failed dependency, and (2) the fact that rpm is not statically linked -- so it's possible to inadvertently remove a shared library it depends on and be unrecoverably screwed. But the underlying problems run much deeper.

Over the last five years, I've watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what was at one time a near-unassailable lead in technical prowess, market share and community prestige. The blunders have been legion on both echnical and political levels. They have included, but were not limited to:

* Chronic governance problems.

* Persistent failure to maintain key repositories in a sane, consistent state from which upgrades might actually be possible.

* A murky, poorly-documented, over-complex submission process.

* Allowing RPM development to drift and stagnate -- then adding another layer of complexity, bugs, and wretched performance with yum.

* Effectively abandoning the struggle for desktop market share.

* Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with any attitude other than blank denial.

In retrospect, I should probably have cut my losses years ago. But I had so much history with Red-Hat/Fedora, and had invested so much effort in trying to fix the problems, that it was hard to even imagine breaking away.

If I thought the state of Fedora were actually improving, I might hang in there. But it isn't. I've been on the fedora-devel list for years, and the trend is clear. The culture of the project's core group has become steadily more unhealthy, more inward-looking, more insistent on narrow "free software" ideological purity, and 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.

I have watched Ubuntu rise to these challenges as Fedora fell away from them. Canonical's recent deal with Linspire, which will give Linux users legal access to WMF and other key proprietary codecs, is precisely the sort of thing Red-Hat/Fedora could and should have taken the lead in. Not having done so bespeaks a failure of vision which I now believe will condemn Fedora to a shrinking niche in the future.

This afternoon, I installed Edgy Eft on my main development machine -- from one CD, not five. In less than three hours' work I was able to recreate the key features of my day-to-day toolkit. The after-installation mass upgrade to current packages, always a frightening prospect under Fedora, went off without a hitch.

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.

Fedora, you had every advantage, and you had my loyalty, and you blew it. And that is a damn, dirty shame. -- Eric S. Raymond

Goodbye, Fedora

Un jour dans la vie d'un poisson rouge - dew's blog

Un homme survole la campagne à bord d'une montgolfière. Il réalise soudain qu'il est perdu. Il réduit son altitude et aperçoit bientôt un autre homme au-dessous de lui. Lorsqu'il est à portée de voix il lui crie :

- Excusez-moi ! Pouvez-vous m'aider ? J'ai promis à un ami de le rejoindre il y a une demi-heure, mais je ne sais plus où je suis !

L'homme à terre lui répond :

- Bien sûr ! Vous êtes à bord d'une montgolfière se déplaçant à environ 10 mètres du sol, entre 40 et 42 degrés de latitude Nord et entre 58 et60 degrés de longitude ouest.

- Vous devez être ingénieur, avance l'aérostier.

- C'est exact, lui répond l'homme à terre. Comment avez-vous deviné ?

- Eh bien, répond l'aérostier, c'est simple : tout ce que vous m'avez dit est techniquement correct, mais je n'ai aucune idée de ce que je peux faire de l'information que vous m'avez donnée, et le fait est que je suis toujours perdu.

L'homme à terre lui dit alors :

- Vous devez être un manager !

- C'est exact, répond l'aérostier, mais comment avez-vous deviné ?

- C'est très simple. Vous ne savez pas où vous êtes ni où vous allez. Vous avez fait une promesse, vous ne savez pas comment vous allez la tenir et vous supposez que je vais régler votre problème. Le fait est que vous êtes exactement dans la situation où vous étiez avant que l'on se rencontre, mais maintenant, quelque part c'est de ma faute !

Une blague toute seule - labanane.org

Very funny Flash video : Evolution of Dance - www.youtube.com

Well, perhaps we will have a gift for christmas 2007 :)

Bits from the Release Team - Debian Planet

Announce of Andreas Barth

Debian Release Management

Originally found on comic.escomposlinux.org