invitation (fwd)

Paweł Gołaszewski blues at ds.pg.gda.pl
Fri Apr 30 15:26:55 CEST 2004


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 18:09:06 +0200
From: Helge Kreutzmann <kreutzm at itp.uni-hannover.de>
To: Paweł Gołaszewski <blues at ds.pg.gda.pl>
Subject: Re: invitation

Hello Pawel,
I guess it is time to say Goodby. Our last PLD server crashed
yesterday (broken hard disk, independent of PLD, of course), so I will
no longer report bugs and you can orphan my bugs (or ignore, close,
whatever). Somehow bugs.pld-linux.org asks me about my password on
every second step now and gives me an error when I try to work on
them.

Please don't get me wrong. I think for the target audience PLD is
great. It is hands on, has a good, solid technical
foundation, and is quite up to date (which is unfortunately not true
with Debian stable).

So, you may ask, why do I leave? There are several reasons, both more
general as well as personal. I roughly order them by importance:

1. No official security
   There was a list once, but for over a year I did not receive
   anouncements. Reading different sources myself, putting in bug
   reports and hoping for fixes (e.g. the screen one is still open;
   but in general you where responsive) takes quite a bit of time
   which I rather invest in maintaining the machines themselfs,
   helping the users and finally working on my PhD-Thesis. Also my
   sucessor probably wouldn't continue it. Even if the bug was swiftly
   fixed, no anouncement happend.

2. I am not a "Hacker"
   I maintain machines. I help my users. I write documentation. 
   Sometimes, I try to patch
   programs to build on alpha. But my C knowledge is limited (I use
   Fortran at work, and shell/perl for sysadmin work) and my interest
   on the internals of programs also. Out of curiosity I occasionally
   read columns about kernel internals, also sometimes I study
   algorithms (I had several cs classes). But I prefer sending in a
   bug report with a backtrace or similar if something does not work. 

   I am not on IRC, I have no ICQ. I like mailinglists, especially if
   they are not too high volume and of good content. 

   As far as I saw, PLD is developed by its users, who communicate on
   IRC, are fluent in C and are willing to hack on something until it
   works the way it should.

   This is pretty orthogonal to my style. There was the idea of the
   security mailinglist, but this was never realized. I know you wanted
   me to co-develop. Besides 3), I am glad if I can test if a certain
   vulnerability exists in PLD, but totally underexperienced to
   properly fix it. Having the power to do this would put me in a
   situation which I really prefer to avoid, at least right now.

3. I like Debian
   Having used SuSE and RedHat in the past, I currently settled in
   Debian. There are major defiencies in Debian (i.e. the release
   schedule) but I belive that they can be improved. I currently do
   quite a bit of work in Debian, and may even become a "official"
   developer soon. Besides alpha related work (web pages, aboot (which
   I co-maintain upstream as well), finding 32bit centric programs and
   working with the developers to fix them) I work on documentation
   (see also 4)): man pages, translations etc. For me, the philosophy
   of Debian is very appealing. Furthermore Debian seems to be the
   choice in current conversion programs (Windows -> Linux). That is
   really nothing against PLD; there are several fields in PLD which I
   like. Not using PLD at work is mainly determined by 1).

4. PLD is Polish(ed)
   I know german, english and a few bits of russian. Having been in
   Poland, I know how to say Hallo (but don't ask me to write it) and
   a few more words. But e.g. "http://www.pld-linux.org/" is mostly in
   polish. So my natural habbit of "Reading the FAQs" is limited. I
   admit, that when I just looked at the website, some menu itmes are
   in german, so maybe this has improved in the recent months; also I
   know (and appreciate) that changelogs and other online docu is in
   english, but I do realize that most users speak at least some
   polish. Btw, this is nothing against poland/polish. If you could
   replace polish by french in this paragraph, nothing would change. 


So, feel free to close my bugs in the BTS (maybe I need to allow
Cookies? I use a new browers, and I denied them out of a reflex),
though I fully believe they are still valid (except the openssh one,
which I would have investigated further if I had could). I do wish PLD
all the best, and you definitly do a great distro (please forward this
to your co-developers) but I am just not the right target audience, I
believe. Maybe we meet in another context some time in the future, who
knows.

Greetings

          Helge
-- 
Helge Kreutzmann, Dipl.-Phys.               Helge.Kreutzmann at itp.uni-hannover.de
  gpg signed mail preferred    gpg-key: finger kreutzm at zibal.itp.uni-hannover.de
    64bit GNU powered                  http://www.itp.uni-hannover.de/~kreutzm
       Help keep free software "libre": http://www.freepatents.org/


-- 
pozdr.  Paweł Gołaszewski 
---------------------------------
worth to see: http://www.againsttcpa.com/
CPU not found - software emulation...



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