[Novalug] dynamic symbolic links

John Holland jholland@vin-dit.org
Tue Apr 28 19:31:32 EDT 2015


http://gabriellacoleman.org/Coleman-Coding-Freedom.pdf <http://gabriellacoleman.org/Coleman-Coding-Freedom.pdf>

Sorry, the link below used to work and is still on her web site.



> On Apr 28, 2015, at 7:11 PM, John Holland via Novalug <novalug@firemountain.net> wrote:
> 
>>>>> modern IT needs. There's a good reason Debian isn't use for
>>> OpenStack or
>>>>> any of the new cloud solutions out there. It's stuck in the past and
>>> not
>>>>> capable of solving the complex IT architectures of today and
>>> tomorrow.
>>>>> And it's not even experimental anymore - so I'm really lost to where
>>>>> Debian and by indirection Ubuntu wants to go from here. Change and
> 
> 
> There’s a book by Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom*, that spends a lot of time on the Debian project. She’s an anthropologist and the book is not concerned with the technology but rather the people and their relationships.  I read it about 3 years ago and decided a bit afterwards to (again) switch to Debian. My reason was the volunteer/democratic ideals of it.  Even though GNU complains because Debian makes “non-free” software available, I think it’s the most successful project that tries to keep to the GNU philosophy ( of course a lot of software in Debian is not copyleft, but you can tell from the Debian Free Software Guidelines where their hearts are).
> 
> The decision to adopt systemd in Debian wreaked havoc on them; people quit, stopped speaking to each other,etc. But it was still (at least nominally) a democratic decision.
> 
> I know that Debian is not on the cutting edge of what’s coming out;  there’s no doubt they are behind the times compared to even Ubuntu, which is a derivative of their less stable branches. I wasn’t following it for the cutting edge technology, I was following it because I thought it’d be cool to “eat my own dog food” - to use stuff I could actually play a part in. I have on my web site unofficial debian packages for enlightenment, which are already behind the times. I wrote a couple scripts to send me email telling me how many downloads of them I got. I didn’t get a lot, but even so, it was satisfying to think I was creating something used by people out there. One guy contacted me to incorporate a patch for European language typing, I was able to update it with that and saw a bunch of downloads afterwards. 
> 
> So I got negative enough  based on systemd to switch to BSD, mainly because of the type of thing we’ve been emailing about. Peter’s posts make me wonder if I am wrong. My Debian install is on the hard drive under my fingers, I’m in OS X but the option to go back to it (and maybe try to upgrade it) is still there.
> 
> Anyway, to me, Debian is sort of a charitable institution, like the Free Software Foundation or the EFF. I don’t expect it to keep up with RedHat/Fedora in terms of being current. It’s like saying a hybrid car isn’t as fast as a sports car, that’s not the point ( if you’re into the Green ideas….)  
> 
> 
> (and I know there are fast hybrids now……)
> 
> 
> *Coding freedom is a free download, here <http      DONT USE THIS     ://codingfreedom.com/> , the first part on the hacker  discovering Linux is pretty entertaining………….
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