[Fwd: Fw: Dropping lunar development activity]

[Couannette]

Hello all Lunar users and devs

I'd like to express my cordial sympathy for Elaine, who along with some
of the people I like to chat with, they'll know themself, is a GREAT and
major strength in our little community.

I think Lunar is created by people that have personnal needs, that share
 common views, and work to achieve a big purpose that barely limits to
the better perimeter of rationals a Linux distro should focus on. (And
it shouldn't be Linux specific, but ........).

Debian and other distributions are plaged by politics: I pray for Lunar
be and kept "out of this world" of mesmerisms... Quality of software is
not a matter of licence or whatever policy flying around. <no rant> If
XFree86 is better than XOrg it is not in the papers field and vis
versa</no rant>.

Now that's said I'd like to tell to everyone that want Lunar to
conquer...err blossom this planet :

1. Thy Should Promote Lunar Philosophy
2. Thy Should Install Stable Lunar Builds Everwhere Its Possible
3. Thy Should Not Update Every Time An Evil Dwarf Groans
4. Thy Should Gather In Domain Teams For QA Test Specific Software
5. Thy Should Run A Lunar Test Box For QA Tests Thyself
6. Thy Should Report Your Software Successes To Thy Domain Teams
7. Thy Should Enforce Stability Through Clearest Lifecycles And Releases
8. Thy Should Fight Interdependencies In Softwares
9. Thy Should Prefer One Good Sofware Than Many Poor Ones
10. Thy Should Love Your Lunar Fellows

Couannette


Auke Kok wrote:
> 
> 
> Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 12:11:50 -0400
> From: elaine <elaine at fwsystems.com>
> To: <lunar at lunar-linux.org>
> Subject: Dropping lunar development activity
> 
> 
> I regret to say that the time has come that I need to announce leaving
> lunar development.
> 
> While as a practical matter, I haven't had time to develop any significant
> code or keep up with package management, that is not the reason I'm
> electing
> to drop the project; there are things I'd like to do with Lunar and I
> will have the time.
> 
> My reasons are twofold
> 
> 1. I'm displeased with the general code quality and developer priorities.
> Specifically I was bit *yet again* this morning by the decision to add
> x11 into the dependency system 'through the back door' of
> 'xserver-profile'.
> This substantially breaks rebuild for my old boxes and I'm not willing to
> continue to work with developers who:  a. don't take policy/design
> commitments
> seriously and b. don't consider backward-compatibilty.
> 
> 2. I'm sick and tired of politics being embedded in the moonbase ala:
> 
> ---paste---
> module XOrg  dependency - purpose: Answer YES to use the open source
> XOrg xserver
> ...
> 1. XOrg which is the default Lunar xserver
> and will be frequently updated. 2. XFree86 which is an older version
> and due to license issues will not be updated ever.
> ---/paste---
> 
> <rant>
> This is bullshit stmtmnt 1 implise that XOrg is open source while others
> aren't; stmtment 2 throws somone's politically motivated module decisions
> in my face.
> 
> As it happens I'm as pleased as anyone to see the chance that the X
> Consortium will again be the repository for a main branch of X11. I was
> building X from source (gnu/fsf tapes) a decade ago and xfree86's code
> quality has never impressed me.
> 
> The Xfree project was nominally more 'free' which was often the reason
> given for xfree86 project's existence.
> 
> However xfree's new license is not non-free and it is arguably not even
> gpl-incompatible for binary distribution, let alone source distribution.
> </rant>
> 
> 
> why I'm leaving:
> 
> The reason that's been given to excuse dropping our long-standing
> promise that X11 will not be built into dependencies:
> 
> 'we don't like fielding questions from newbies'
> 
> I'm sorry my response is 'build a system that even a fool can use and
> only a fool will want to'.
> 
> So in exchange for something which could have been added to the FAQ
> the project is losing a primary (albeit currently inactive) developer.
> 
> 
> why it's important to stick to commitments:
> 
> I wrote and monitor the code that checks on how often lusers update
> moonbase. The median user updates less than every 6 months.
> 
> The admonition 'run lunar update (daily, weekly, monthly)' just
> doesn't cut it. That is not the average user's behavior.
> 
> Completely cutting off support for running; stable systems by
> making radical changes in the dependency db imo pretty well amounts
> to ignoring the actual behavior of the majority of users.
> 
> 
> Where I'd like to see lunar going:
> 
> Those of you who've been around to hear my rants on IRC over the
> years will probably be bored by this.
> 
> Lunar as a project (imnvho) has been far too willing to release
> badly broken updates to moonbase (and less often core).
> 
> I believe bugs introduced that way are far harder to fix; ymmv.
> I would like to see implications of changes actually be thought
> through before implementation.
> 
> (AND I drew a line in the sand over this months ago asking that
> *critical* modules (e.g. gcc; glibc; gnome; db; db4; ... ....) be
> given sensible testing)
> 
> Regarding xserver-profile as a dependiency.
> 
> I could come up with at least 2 alternate approaches to the xserver-profile
> kluge. alternate-depends as the clean way or a hack to allow lusers who
> don't want x11 in deps to opt-out.
> 
> -profile 'modules' are a pretty ugly hack to begin with; they aren't
> even reasonably integrated into the dependency system and so what we
> got with this one was a combination of two ugly hacks for the price
> of one.
> 
> I'd like to see Lunar not do that again but as I said at the start it's
> not gonna be my decision or task.
> 
> I wish the project the best of luck. Of the source-based solutions it's
> the best (imo).
> 
> 
> elaine
> 
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