Re: Release process (was Re: DarwinPorts 1.3.1)

On 8/3/06, Paul Guyot <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Dear Tabitha,
>
> The "executive summary" expression was nothing more than a joke, and
> I only meant to close a thread already quite long. Thank you for your
> interest, I do feel pressured these days, but not by Apple employees,
> Jordan K. Hubbard included.
>
> BTW, just "Paul" or "Paul Guyot" will do.


Apologies Paul if I went a bit overboard, but it kind of bothers me to see
those comments about Darwin Ports possibly being merely an intellectual
curiosity and I don't want to see it die, nor do I want to see Apple
employees who make a good income living in the vicinity of Cupertino,
California United States of America acting as if the the onus for
infrastructure improvements to Darwin Ports is mostly on the open source
community members who are volunteering their time.

It doesn't help my mood today that Apple announced they likely are going to
restate their earnings from year 2002, which is material enough to issue an
8K statement < http://biz.yahoo.com/e/060719/aapl8-k.html > For those who
live most of the time in the world of programming software, a little
business lesson --> in the U.S.A. home of the Enron scandal, issuing an 8K
for a publicly traded company is considered by the SEC to be materially
significant to its shareholders.

As a result of this ensuing mess, Apple missed an SEC deadline to file more
information yesterday and missing such deadlines is grounds for NASDAQ
delisting. You don't have to believe me, just check out today's Wall St.
Journal online or the atomic version printed on dead trees (newspaper). A
few excerpts from the Journal in an article published today 4 August 2006
...

*Apple Computer* Inc. said a review of stock-option troubles turned up
> "additional evidence of irregularities" that will likely cause the computer
> maker to restate financial results.
>
The disclosure, made late yesterday, marked a noticeable shift in Apple's
> posture over its options problems. Two weeks ago, the Cupertino, Calif.,
> company said it didn't believe it would need a "material adjustment" to its
> financials unless its investigation turned up something else.
>
The computer maker is among the highest-profile names to be caught up in the
> stock-option scandal that is hitting many companies in Silicon Valley, and
> others across the country.


... as for the possible delisting ...

Apple said in its news release that it had filed a form with the Securities
> and Exchange Commission saying that certain of its past financial statements
> shouldn't be relied upon. An Apple spokeswoman said the company had filed
> the form yesterday. It wasn't available on the SEC's Web site yesterday
> evening, which the spokeswoman attributed to a time lag. Apple appears to
> have missed the 5:30 p.m. EDT filing deadline.
>

Asked whether Apple expected to be able to maintain its listing on the
> Nasdaq Stock Market because of the delay in filing its quarterly results
> with securities regulators, Mr. Dowling said Apple is "focused on resolving
> these issues as quickly as possible" and intends to "comply with any Nasdaq
> requirements."
>

I truly hope this all blows over and no illegalities are discovered. This
makes me thing though, how can the world have any faith in American
companies anymore after the Enron scandal? How can Americans have any faith
any more in their own? Is this capitalism ad nausea?

How does this tie to Darwin Ports? Well, its kind of sad because it makes
one feel as if money is the the only thing that counts and makes me question
just how much Apple really cares about the open source communities of which
it utilizes to make a lot of money (granted we are seeing some good things
happening in WebKit so its not all black or white of an issue in this
context). Look at the awesome new book by Amit Singh (Mac OS X Essentials)
and you soon realise more than ever before just how much open sources are
integrated into the entire Mac OS X platform and user experience.

A lot of people will say that the death of OpenDarwin Project and Apple's
possible SEC violations coming in a matter of just a few days of each other
are pure coincidence. I don't thinks so. Step outside the box and one can
see that it is part of a bigger picture, a systemic problem that trickles
down from the top ranks of Apple / NeXT. If Steve Jobs is found to be guilty
of anything (I hope he is not), then I think part of any reparations should
be to ask him to contribute to revamping the Darwin Ports infrastructure so
that it surely would not be more than an intellectual curiosity :-)

Ok, nuff said for the day but let this bigger picture situation be food for
thought especially for those of us who are usually so busy and pressured
that all we mostly have time for are our families and our coding development
to eek out a living!

T.

Regards,
>
> Paul
>
> Le 3 août 06 à 23:14, Tabitha McNerney a écrit :
>
> > 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.
> >> http://www.kallisys.com/
> >> http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~guyot/ <http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/%
> >> 7Eguyot/>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Darwinports mailing list
> >> [email protected]
> >> http://www.opendarwin.org/mailman/listinfo/darwinports
> >>
>
> --
> Ministre ultraplénipotentiaire en disponibilité.
> Mobile. Sans baignoire fixe.
> http://www.kallisys.com/
> http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~guyot/
>
>