Re: Four people decided the fate of debian with systemd. Bad faith likely
On Sun, 2 Mar 2014 11:27:59 -0500 Steve Litt of Troubleshooters.Com litt...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, 1 Mar 2014 18:26:25 -0700 ghaverla ghave...@materialisations.com wrote: I will try Sabyon (sp?). But it looks like it might move to systemd willingly leaving no option. It is based on Gentoo, which I could move to. I tested Sabayon during my last distro shootout, and it's *a lot* different than Debian, especially Debian Stable. Sabayon is a rolling distro, which can be convenient, but means broken code could sneak onto your computer at any time. This is also true of things like Ubuntu, but it's not true of Debian Stable unless a security update is bad. Sabayon isn't all that easy to install. If I remember correctly, I was forced to configure the kernel myself at install time (I might be confusing it with Gentoo, this shootout was about 3 years ago). I got the kernel wrong, and had to boot from System Rescue CD. Anyway, Sabayon was difficult to install, and felt rather fragile to me. I have no knowledge of init systems and couldn't possibly comment on systemd vs udev vs SysV, so I don't understand what's so terrible about systemd. But my research from 3 years ago tell me that Sabayon's no panacea. I just started using Debian (Wheezy) on a regular basis, and like its solid ease. Systemd would need to be awfully bad for me to give that up. Hi Steve. We both moved to Claws from kmail at about the same time. Most of the programming I have done is numerical methods, but for years on Debian I was compiling my own kernel. I am trying to start a big project at Savannah involving a bunch of number crunching, when this came up. But I have done a bunch of systems stuff, running Sabyon, Gentoo or Slackware shouldn't be a problem. I maintained a token ring driver for a few kernel revisions past where upstream quit, cross compiled gcc on Linux for Solaris, ported Perl-4.x to QNX-2.x. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140302113108.61eaf0a7@newmain.materia
Re: Numerical Methods Programming: was: Four people decided the yadda yadda yadda
On Sun, 2 Mar 2014 14:46:21 -0500 Steve Litt of Troubleshooters.Com litt...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, 2 Mar 2014 11:31:08 -0700 ghaverla ghave...@materialisations.com wrote: Most of the programming I have done is numerical methods, What language did you use? I've used a little bit of Scheme, and kind of liked it for numbers. When you say numerical methods programming, do you mean this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_analysis I still have fortran as a user ID on some websites. My M.Eng. project (mid 80's) was a dynamical system of differential equations where equations disappeared at random, in VAX FORTRAN. I had doubly linked lists and garbage collection in FORTRAN to run this stuff. I've done some in C, some in C++ and a lot in Perl. I've often thought of writing a differentiator program in Python, or who knows, maybe Scheme, perhaps something that solves y = f(x) type equations simply by iterating closer and closer to see where it crosses the axes. This gets ever more inviting, because I'm continually forgetting more and more of my high school and college math. I'd love to know what you're doing and how you're doing it. This big project I want to start at Savannah (the nongnu side) is probably going to be 45-55 Perl modules when it is finished. The data I am working from is GPS tracklog data, but there is no reason a person couldn't have trace element analysis of a surface from inside an Auger microscope (my background is materials science and engineering). Outliers happen, especially with personal GPS and no differentials (or postprocessing). Most of the methods for detecting outliers, strictly speaking, can only be used to detect a single outlier in data. One of my modules is in implementation of Pierce's Criteria, where I have tables to detect up to 9 outliers in up to 60 data points. As I am starting with tens of thousands of points, I have to get down to 60 before I can think about applying this to flag outliers (in GPS, some errors are blunders, which can be corrected after the fact). I am using a median quadtree to partition the data so that it eventually gets down to 60 or less points. The idea is to surface things eventually using thin plate splines, but they have a free parameter in their design. So, I want to wrap the TPS fitting with Leave One Out Cross Validation. To find the optimal value of the parameter, I am supercharging Brent's Method for function minimization based on work Jack Crenshaw (Embedded.com) has done, and adding some ideas of my own (he wants his new version to work in embedded devices, I want mine to be general purpose). Another thing I am trying to set up, is coming up with a course (professional development) to teach engineers about computational statistics (Monte Carlo, bootstrap, jackknife, and others). I'm a bit of an outlier in Materials Science and Engineering. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140302151633.37dd1bd0@newmain.materia
Re: Four people decided the fate of debian with systemd. Bad faith likely
On Sun, 02 Mar 2014 16:53:59 +1100 Scott Ferguson scott.ferguson.debian.u...@gmail.com wrote: I disagree with the binaryness of systemd. Do you mean the *one* binary in systemd? I'm pretty sure the source is available. As I understand things, one of the benefits of systemd is a fast boot process. As I only boot my computer once per year (or so), this is terribly important to me (sarcasm). My computer spends a lot of time doing BOINC. As I understand things, to speed up the boot process, all the script files get replaced with binary stuff. If there is a problem, you're hooped as you can't edit some text file to fix things. Along with this goes a more complicated PID=1. The guys at Bell Labs were all smart guys. Text files and simple PID=1 make a lot of sense. There are lots of people who like the idea of fast boot times. I think most of these people are looking for hibernation, not boot. But knowing Debian was going to change, I went looking for refuge, and things derived from Gentoo might be home, things derived from Slackware might be home. Choice is good. Fortunately it's one of the key benefits of Open Source development. There is no choice, when we are informed that systemd will be the default in 8.0, when in unstable and testing systemd is already present and seemingly no way to remove it. Or rather there is a choice: your way or the highway. And my decision, was highway. Maybe things were presented wrong. Maybe things were not presented when they should have been. I have autism, and tend to take everything at face value. As I seen things, there was no choice. As things progress, I still see no choice, except the highway. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140302173102.611b7c4c@newmain.materia
Re: Four people decided the fate of debian with systemd. Bad faith likely
This isn't properly replied to. I am new to Claws, and I have no time to figure out gpg signing. On Sun, 2 Mar 2014 11:56:22 +0200 Andrei POPESCU andreimpope...@gmail.com wrote: On Sb, 01 mar 14, 20:03:54, ghaverla wrote: But the fact there are no options is what bothers me. There are options. Even if Canonical will be pulling the plug on udev there is still OpenRC. The maintainer could use more help though. I looked in Debian a week or so ago. OpenRC wasn't even in experimental. Either I looked wrong, or it has only recently been added. I know OpenRC is at Gentoo (that where it came from, as I understand things). I don't understand Canonical pulling plug on udev. Pulling plug on upstart makes sense, pulling plug on systemd makes sense. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140302171839.4f667adb@newmain.materia
Re: Four people decided the fate of debian with systemd. Bad faith likely
On Sun, 02 Mar 2014 13:05:20 -0600 y...@marupa.net wrote: Sure, systemd has its flaws (While I like the journal, there are downsides to a binary-based log when your system is screwed up and your only resource is a LiveCD. I don't know if there's a way to read the journal outside the system that created it.), but ultimately between our choices: Stick with SysV, Upstart (Which takes an everything and the kitchen sink approach to its dependency startups and encourages complexity.), and OpenRC (Which utterly misses the reasons why SysV needs replacing.), I'd choose systemd. My inclination is to edit out even more, but perhaps too much context gets hit. I've been playing UN*X since 1984. Init files are what they are. They get executed once at boot, and seldom seen again. I've seen different variations, including having everything in rc.local. I want to do number crunching, I don't want to be bothered by the boot process. It works. If I have to go make coffee while the boot process is happening, I'll go make coffee. In reading about UN*X since 1984, I have never seen mention of problems with the boot process, niggles yes. But things that cause the entire system to be classified as unusable, no. This kind of talk (writing) in my experience, is just in the last maybe 2 months. Systemd seems to have 2 proponents, people interested in fast booting, and people interested in servers. The intersection of those two groups is almost the NULL set. I think the answer to faster booting is hibernation, and people have been playing with that for many years as near as I can tell. To the people running servers who want faster booting, I would suggest that they not turn the things off. It isn't change is evil, the saying is if it isn't broken, don't fix it. Up until a month or so ago, I wouldn't know Lennart from a hole in the ground. He has a history with projects. Someone suggested he may not have started Pulse, I don't know. As far as I know, there are still problems with Pulse. I will not install Pulse on any system I set up, and if someone wants me to take care of their Linux box, Pulse gets removed. He may not have started Avahi, I don't know. I disable avahi daemons and executables as a matter of course, for much more than 1 year. My beef with Avahi? For my LAN, I have 0 need. Why is it required? Chmod 640 and the problem is more or less gone. But I still have the useless downloads, which cuts into my bandwidth and possibly monthly allowance. I don't want to download stuff I don't want or need. I have no idea if avahi is finished? I read the Free Software/FOSS/Libre news a lot. And I have more than a decade. I didn't see news that init scripts are broken. With Respect To boot times, I would think moving to a specialised shell that had no interactive capability (such as Gnu Readline) might be a place to start. That the shell often had to invoke subshells to do things, to me might be a reason to try Perl to boot a system. Just as a trial, Perl is big. But once you get it up and running, it doesn't need to invoke inferior processes for many tasks, and is capable of starting binaries with calculated arguments. Do you have a reference on sysvinit maintainer having problems? I don't anticipate having time for a couple of months, but maybe after. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140302180946.7bcad2ab@newmain.materia
Re: Four people decided the fate of debian with systemd. Bad faith likely
On Mon, 03 Mar 2014 12:52:40 +1100 Scott Ferguson scott.ferguson.debian.u...@gmail.com wrote: You *imagine*, not think (using reductive logic?). I'm sure your not a bully who forces your ideas onto those that do want fast boot instead of hibernation. Did you really need to send this? The entire note, not just this snippet. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140302230029.3e560c2d@newmain.materia
Re: Four people decided the fate of debian with systemd. Bad faith likely
On Sun, 02 Mar 2014 01:28:38 +0100 Ralf Mardorf ralf.mard...@alice-dsl.net wrote: We Arch users made a poll. Even if more users would have been against systemd, the developers would have switched to systemd, but most users wanted systemd. We, around 49% and me were against systemd, but around 51 % were pro systemd. Nowadays it makes live easier for all of us who use several different distros, when _all_ or at least the most important distros will switch to systemd. To discuss pros and cons of systemd a time machine is needed, to go back more than 3 years ago. To discuss it in 2014 is a little bit to late. I don't begrudge DD deciding to make systemd the default in 8.0. But the announcement of that, was the first time systemd came on my radar. Hence, I (not the person who started this thread) couldn't have engaged in debate 3+ years ago either. I disagree with the binaryness of systemd. But knowing Debian was going to change, I went looking for refuge, and things derived from Gentoo might be home, things derived from Slackware might be home. In trying to investigate this weeks ago, it was not a measured argument I was observing. I started with Linux with the 1.2.13 kernel, and my first job was upgrading a Linux box running 1.2.9 with 1.2.13. I have run across a lot of news, email, blogs and projects since then. There are a handful of personalities I dislike, and there are a handful of projects I dislike. Usually, you can find a replacement. Sometimes you have to remove stuff. One of the first sets of projects I found myself removing if present, or staying away from was Pulse audio. Some people never had problems, I think they did fresh installs where Pulse was the default. If Pulse ever had a problem, it usually seemed to turn into a nightmare. Long before I heard of Avahi, I had read about zeroconf. Seemed like a neat idea. I had no use for it. Then I found avahi causing me grief on KDE, and then I find out it is zeroconf, and it is required (or close to it). So, I just got in the habit of removing execute permission on all the binaries. Up until a few weeks ago, I had no idea who was behind either Pulse or avahi. Udev has bothered me. And then comes the systemd announcement, and part of that is involved systemd taking over udev. About that time, I learn who is behind systemd, and that this is the same person who was behind Pulse and avahi. And since then, I seen a note that this same udev thing is going to get pushed into the kernel. Soon. I will try Sabyon (sp?). But it looks like it might move to systemd willingly leaving no option. It is based on Gentoo, which I could move to. And once upon a time I ran slackware, so I could move to that, which looks like it will have options. At least to some things. And most recently, I built a debian package from source with pbuilder, in an effort to learn about removing unwanted functionality (PolicyKit). It turns out I also had to remove dbus and fax support, but I don't need either of those for my printing needs. It is possible that there won't be problems with Debian (or other distributions), but I think there will be. So I am moving, it is just to be determined how far. But to read that a split of 49:51 means there can't be options is disheartening. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140301182625.7a28d9bd@newmain.materia
Re: Four people decided the fate of debian with systemd. Bad faith likely
On Sun, 02 Mar 2014 03:11:24 +0100 Ralf Mardorf ralf.mard...@alice-dsl.net wrote: On Sat, 2014-03-01 at 18:26 -0700, ghaverla wrote: But to read that a split of 49:51 means there can't be options is disheartening. I was inaccurate, I guess there were much more than 51% pro sytsmed ;). But indeed, systemd caused the longest flame wars on several mailing lists I ever read + I participated to some of those flame wars. The only flame wars I liked were the emacs/vi ones. I was using slackware before they turned the tarball into a package. I can go back to that if need be. I've used HP-UX, Solaris, QNX and other things UN*X or UN*Xlike. BSD would not be a problem. Plan 9 might be interesting. But the fact there are no options is what bothers me. But, I have a friend a couple of thousand km away, who has a partially borked system, and we are trying to talk him into getting things back up. So, I will come back to this later. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140301200354.626156da@newmain.materia
Re: pbuilder
On Thu, 27 Feb 2014 20:22:55 -0700 ghaverla ghave...@materialisations.com wrote: I guess I am trapped by an update that is midway through. I was meaning to recompile hplip, and one suggestion was pbuilder. The update wen through today. I do not know what the intended way to update the sudoers file is. What I did was edit /usr/share/psycho/users/uid (where uid=debian) to enter the following: = Cmnd_Alias PBUILDER = /usr/sbin/pbuilder /usr/lib/pbuilder/pbuilder-satsifydepends debian ALL = (root) NOPASSWD:SETENV: PBUILDER #debian ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/pbuilder #debian ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/lib/pbuilder/pbuilder-satsifydepends = This at least lets pbuilder run a long time, before dying with what seems a fairly common problem. cp: cannot stat 'debian/tmp/etc/dbus-1': No such file or directory. So, I will see what http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/FTBFS turns up. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140228132126.32db8df7@newmain.materia
pbuilder
I guess I am trapped by an update that is midway through. I was meaning to recompile hplip, and one suggestion was pbuilder. I set up a new user to do the compiling under, and was hoping to put the pbuilder environment in that HOME. It took a few tries to get pbuilder create from building everything in /var/cache. Got passed that. I made my few changes to the hplip package, and tried to build it. I kept having sudo kill the process because of some environment variable. The same error message goes back 4 years (or more), I seen numerous suggestions for changes to sudoers, and a few for command lines, nothing changed. Sudo killed things midway through. Well, I still had things in /var/cache, so I altered my .pbuilderrc file to once again point to /var/cache. The pbuilder process went further. Right away, pbuilder noticed I had some dependencies missing, and went about trying to satisfy them. Well, my normal apt-get has a stack of 100 or so packages that I am holding off on upgrading (many waiting for a necessary X upgrade). So instead of pbuilder just looking to upgrade half a dozen packages, it felt it needed to upgrade all of them, not just the half dozen it needed. Earlier, I had discovered I was missing libsnmp-dev and libdbus-1-dev (playing with ./configure), so it would seem that something in the debian control information for hplip is missing those 2. Those 2 were among the half dozen that pbuilder later wanted to update. After killing this runaway update I didn't want to do, I tried to manually upgrade the half dozen or so packages that pbuilder was anxious about, and most of them it says are fine on my system, a couple are trapped until some cups updates come through I guess. I can live with printing being down for a couple of days, maybe those packages will show up, and I can try building new base.tar files that supposedly have all the depends in them. I guess if I unbundle the tarball, chroot in, I should just be able to apt-get what is missing and rebundle the tarball. But, it would seem that whatever environment variable(s) is involved, the bug in pbuilder was fixed for the circumstance where everything is in /var/cache, but not if the build environment is somewhere under /home/. I have two other emergencies I was supposed to drop everything for, so I am moving on to them. If someone had more (useful) ideas on things to try with pbuilder in /home, I can try those tomorrow or Saturday I guess. If people were interested in this report, wonderful. If not, well I got some more typing practice. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140227202255.397564f2@newmain.materia
Re: Re: [OT] KDM No Longer In KDE ?!?
Trivia really. Long ago, I tried to set up kdm to run multiple x servers, and it was too opaque for me, and so I tried gdm and found it easy. There were other aspects of gdm I liked. Then Gnome 3 came along, and its gdm3 couldn't do multiple x servers (or so I read). Consequently, I am still running gdm-2.20.11-4. On unstable. With Debian doing so much updating lately (get rid of deadwood, like old users such as myself), I figured I better download the 2.20.11-4 source package from oldstable before it goes away. But, sometime between now and April, I will be moving to Gentoo, Slackware or beyond. I guess 15 years of Debian is enough. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20140221094033.1a10be12@newmain.materia
Re: Help with command - cp
Your requirement (to skip hidden files and directories) is what is usually required. But, as a generic rule, you can use the echo command to help with analysing how the command line shell might expand a wild card. echo cp /path/to/src/* /path/to/dest some_tmp_file If I do this on my home directory, I could a huge list as I have too many files. Which is why I redirected the output to a file. And looking in the file, I find that there are no hidden directories or files copied. If we look at your command line, you have two switches -R and -p. The -R turns on recursive copying, not only is every file in .../sourcedir/A copied, every subdirectory of .../sourcedir/A, and subdirectories of those, to the end of the file tree is copied. The -p switch asks for the preservation of metadata: ownership, groupship, and times. If you are the owner of the files under sourcedir/A and you are also the owner of destinationdir/B, I would expect the ownership and groupship to already be proper, and so it is only the file time information which is being preserved. Preserve is important if root is doing the copying. Gord -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20140126080910.208c8f5e@newmain.materia
