Re: Release process (was Re: DarwinPorts 1.3.1)

This may be completely off the wall but friends of mine have been telling me
how much the Ubuntu Linux distro is catching on and perhaps knocking on the
door of some established distros (such as Fedora). Part of the reason
apparently is that Ubuntu is easy to use and one of my friends swears by the
package management system that Ubuntu uses (he said RPMs will be a thing of
the past).

At a meta level, is there anything that Darwin Ports can generally learn
from the growing success of Ubuntu and its seemingly thriving community?
What is Apple's interest / role in interfacing with the Darwin Ports
community just as it has (apparently done a nice job) at interfacing with
the parts of the KDE community that works on KHTML which has been integrated
into WebKit?

It kind of worried me when I read earlier in this thread that Paul Guyot
felt compelled to give Jordan K. Hubbard an "executive summary"  as if Mr.
Hubbard is a potential investor or venture capitalist of some sort which he
most assuredly is not -- no personal offense intended.

Its nice that Apple takes a cursory interest in Darwin Ports (saw
Ernie Prabhakar
chime in a recent thread saying "Interesting stuff!" regarding the very nice
work that Dr. Guyot did with the trace mode).

Reading these threads where the Apple employees interject comments and
suggestions, it concerns me because we have just been notified of the demise
of OpenDarwin and it feels as if Darwin Ports is kind of just hanging in
there by a few threads. It worries me further that Apple's DRM policies as
seen with the iPod might be psychologically seeping into the collective
consciousness in Cupertino, which I just can't help but wonder if that was
in any way connected to the demise of OpenDarwin. I hope not actually
because I'm fond of Apple. I think it would be very interesting to find out
how many Apple employees inside Apple actually use Darwin Ports, but I doubt
this information would ever be published.

On a final, note the recent contributions that Dr. Guyot has made to Darwin
Ports are very much appreciated by people such as myself who make use of DP
but are not fluent in Tcl ... I try to contribute in other ways such as
helping other people on the mailing list or contributing a bug notification
(testing if you will) but my contributions pale in comparison.

I don't know Dr. Guyot -- never met him, and have never exchanged email with
him directly -- but the guy is obviously a sharp cookie with his Ph.D (Dr.
Ernie is not the only "doctor" in the house) focusing his research on
"Agent-Based Participatory Simulations" as a Fellow computer scientist at a
place called the Honiden Lab in Tokyo, Japan. It seems that Darwin Ports is
also very much an international multicultural community which quite possibly
might not reflect the monoculture inside Cuptertino headquarters.

As an unpaid Darwin Ports volunteer, Dr. Guyot inherited earlier versions of
Darwin Ports to work with (therefore ancestry dating back many moons ago to
the genesis of Darwin Ports which genesis may have been co-created by Apple
employees?). It is quite bad form, in my view for Dr. Guyot to be put in the
down position, thus causing him to feel pressured as if he should provide a
paid Apple employee with an executive summary. For Hubbard to assert earlier
in this thread that "DarwinPorts will never be more than an intellectual
curiosity until it evolves the infrastructure ... " is a rather pompous and,
in my view, sad statement. It sounds like something that would be uttered
from the voice of a person caught up in the monocultural hubris found inside
the depths of the Microsoft campus in Redmond (I know because I've been
there before), not from the interior of one of Silicon Valley's Cinderella
stories which started in the 1970s at 1 Infinite Loop, broke off into NeXT
for a while and then came full circle.

Long live Darwin Ports? Or is the intellectual curiosity bit bucket knocking
on its door?

Regards,

T.

On 8/2/06, Paul Guyot <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> Le 3 août 06 à 17:15, Jordan K. Hubbard a écrit :
>
> >> Library injection gives enough granularity to be able to
> >> independently:
> >> - detect what the package refers to
> >> - prevent the package from doing dirty things
> >> - prevent the package from referring to things
> >
> > Which sounds like we're saying the same thing - I'm also advocating
> > that the package not be able to "refer" to things like /usr/local/
> > include/jpeg.h or /opt/local/bin/myfuzzylanguage at all unless it's
> > also been explicitly specified in the Portfile as a dependency.
> > Yet you've said in other messages that you don't want to deny opens
> > (or attempts to exec) to either of those things, so now I'm confused.
>
> The keyword here is "independently". I'm just stating what library
> injection can be used for, not what it should do for the very DP
> project.
> We still disagree: I don't think we should deny opens (third item),
> while you think we should (and this is what chroot gives anyway).
>
> Let me provide you with an executive summary:
> * We both consider that library injection can more or less provide
> the same features as chroot+union mount, but it's more lightweight.
> * You suggest to extend the library injection code to be equivalent
> to chroot+union mount. You base this opinion on the fact that it's
> just the way many binary package builder systems work, and this is a
> strong argument indeed.
> * I say: those systems use chroot. Library injection provides a
> greater granularity we should take advantage of, in particular by not
> denying opens but just recording them.
>
> I developed arguments for this in several other mails in this thread.
>
> Paul
> --
> Ministre ultraplénipotentiaire en disponibilité.
> Mobile. Sans baignoire fixe.
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> http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~guyot/ <http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/%7Eguyot/>
>
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