On Mon, May 28, at 07:50 Bruce Dubbs wrote:
> Ag. D. Hatzimanikas wrote:
> > On Sun, May 27, at 02:55 Dan Nicholson wrote:
> >> On 5/27/07, Randy McMurchy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >>> Dan Nicholson wrote:
> >>>> I wanted to apply a fix to the compressdoc script that someone sent a
> >>>> couple months ago, but I realized this would break the stable book.
> >>> As Bruce has mentioned twice in the last few months, I think
> >>> it's time to simply dump the compressdoc script. I mean with
> >>> disk space so cheap now, do you think anyone really uses that
> >>> script?
> >> This guy does.
> >>
> >> http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/blfs-dev/2007-March/016744.html
> >>
> >> And really, if the script works, then why would we remove it? Unless
> >> it becomes a maintenance burden because it's breaking all the time. If
> >> you really want it out, though, then we should ask on the list to find
> >> out if people are using it.
> >
> > I do.
>
> I'm curious. Why?
>
To answer to your question, I've to talk about my personal life and
believes, and although I don't have a problem with it, I really don't
want to bloat the mailing list, so I will try to do my best to keep the
text in reasonable level, but disclaimer: Don't expect a short answer.
As a start, these short paragraphs:
I am considering myself as an environmentalist (hence my obsession with
the environment variables).
I am interesting mostly about the influence of the local _and_ global weather,
that means with few words (winds, sun, moon), to the local micro climate,and
to the local vegetation, waters, etc...
Also the interaction in a local level, of the various geographical special
conditions like mountains, plants and trees, ground, etc...
The most interesting part is, how the animals react and interact with
the environment.
Thankfully I am not associated with any official organization that would
make my work un-independent, since I would have obligations.
I worked very hard for 15 years to do that and to pay for this freedom, and
I am blessed in the last 2 years, to have enough time to continue with my
operation, and thankfully from the Autumn, we'll move to our new place, very
close to the forests I am working on.
Now:
I will not say anything new that you don't already know; how cruel were the
human beings with our earth in the last century and especially in the last
20-30 years.
But the thing you don't probably know, is _how_ close we are in a point
that we *shouldn't* go out in the sun without protection.
How close we are in a point that we shouldn't drink water, if we are not
totally sure if it is clean.
How close we are in a point that we shouldn't breath the air!, because is
heavy polluted!
A tottaly different situation than it used to be, just before a few
years, and still things are totally unpredictable for the near future.
Predictions change by hour now.
I do have my own predictions and observations, but I will keep them into
myself.
And because?
Because we don't care. Because we want conveniences and because we are
greedy and because we like the exhibition of ourselves.
The size of our car, the size of our house, the size of our dick, the
fancy clothes, all these little stupid insignificant things that are
trying to hide our insecurity, but that they are wasting a great deal
of the resources of our land.
And I wouldn't mind at all, I wouldn't give a single dime, if all these
operations, all this business model that builted around these facts,
wouldn't interact with the rest of the environment and especially with my
desire to live in a clean environment, with my desire that this earth
should be in a clean state for our children and for the childrens of our
children.
We all pay, for the big sized and unneeded Mercedes-Benz of the rich guys.
And that is a misunderstanding. She/he doesn't pay, WE PAY. The rest of
us PAY.
Q. In the case of Linux, is it going to be almost the same thing?
A. All I know by mostly reading and hearkened respected people around,
that Linux once it was like a slim young boy with dreams how to built a
secure simple system.
Now is fat and with no clear destination and doesn't give a dime about
security.
In my case, I don't want the date command (an exaggeration but holds the
whole truth), since I and other programs can call the strftime function.
I don't want all these buttons and bloated DE'S (I hate when I see young
developers to spent their time for that purpose, when the first thing
they had to do is to clean the code of garbages, unneeded functions, just
because they want to satisfy the good looking insecure guy that hiding
in them (we all hiding this guy in fact), who is thirsty [sic] for a bright
fancy environment, yay for them).
Because, almost no-one is willing to spend his time to learn (our great
advantage and our privilege as humans, is our capability for education)
-- there is a saying: I will learn until the day I die --
the proper way to administrate and work with an operating system.
When was the last time in that list or any other list, that we've talked about
how to make a secure system? -- [ Just have a look to your Apache/sshd logs,
and wow!!! scary, you will see what I mean ] -- about chrooted environments,
about restricted shells, virtual machines -- thankfully there are people like
Robert that cares (libcap).
Hint: Have a look to the POSIX capabilities, it's an incredible piece of work
and it's being there untouched, because developers they have better things to
do, like to make a plugin for the bloated firefox or Conqueror.
Personally, what I am interesting, is a way to use and have in my computer,
only the absolutely needed C functions ( something like uClibc with UTF-8
support)
and a bare-bone kernel.
Unfortunately, I came late to Linux, I am an udev boy, :) and the worst of all
I am not a programmer (all I am interesting is shell and vim scripting), because
all I do is text manipulation (this is my job in computers), but I wish I knew
some low level language like C and had a proper education and of course to be a
little bit more smarter.
In addition, If only people could listen to Markus Kuhn [1] and get rid of X.
And to finish, that's why the first thing I do, when I am doing a fresh
installation
is to get rid of double installed or totally unneeded man pages, unneeded
(cups, X, scanner) drivers, unneeded locales inherited from the wild past
of ISO-19*, unneeded keymaps, stupid infos, half of Xorg, unused perl modules,
encodings, docs that are only meant for developers, yet there are installed by
default (like the GTK+ docs), icons for (cursors, for desktop, for menus
etc...),
unneeded binaries that I never used and I will never be.
And I compress the man pages too.
It's my way to resist as a common ignorant user to unconcern.
All these are about 500 Mbytes of precious space.
And that is the second thing, that I am getting pissed.
People tend to say.
Oh well why the hell you are doing that, since hards disk space is chip
these days, or why you are caring about memory leaks since we have ton
of MBytes of memory sticks, and why you care about bad codded applications that
don't use the cpu with an effective way.
Thanks to god there are intelligent people like Dr. Con Kolivas [2] that spent
their precious time, to improve the desktop experience and the interaction
between the user and the machine.
I hope I made the why enough clear for you.
1. http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/2005-01/msg00061.html
2. http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/
--
"This land was made for you and me" Woodie Guthrie.
"And everything was made for you and me
all of it was made for you and me
cause it just belongs to you and me."
I am the Passenger.
--
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