Patrick's playground

So, like, I've been using apache a bit. At work. Because we have legacy apps that NEED apache and tomcat and other horrible things you should not have to know about.

Now here's the One Meeeeeeeelion Dollar question: Why did the Gentoo Apache maintainers decide to kill the apache2ctl binary and link the init script to it instead? That way you lose many functions and wonder why the output for loaded modules somehow ... looks like a confused init script. It's a pointless invasive change that kills functionality for no reason.

So once I've managed to work around this extra braindamage to a braindamaged application I'll try to find out who thought this was a good idea and see if I can convince this entity to change its mind.

*sigh* I'm getting to old for this stuff ...

I just realized I misunderestimated one thing -

People like spb, Misanthrop (oh wait, Phil, not Mis) and a few others were dissing Gentoo at every chance they had quite simply because they like it too much. See, the problem is that they committed themselves to a project they knew was not going to be liked by many and which pushed them away quite a bit from the rest of the userbase.
So the only way to not feel bad about this is quite simply to badmouth Gentoo. It's not their fault that they feel bad, but there's another factor.
They couldn't just leave Gentoo. They had to be kicked out so they have an external reason why it sucks so much.

And what do we learn from that? Who knows.

kekeke zergrush!

As you might have noticed I, like all other ex-devs, have been removed from planet larrythecow. So now I don't have an audience to think of, and I won't feel bad if I say bad words. Yey!

time emerge paludis

real    141m13.965s
user    135m59.178s
sys     4m57.679s

time emerge portage

real    1m15.212s
user    1m8.604s
sys     0m6.580s

So I guess my new development machine can install portage around 100 times faster than paludis. Guess what I'll continue to use ...
And since I forgot USE="portage" again I can't even compare the runtime because it don't work, mon. It be broken ... (hint: EAPI1 is quite neat if you know how to handle it)

In other news, I'm guilty of evil sensationalism. (Oh noes!)
As Ferdy notices it's not a security issue directly which I've mentioned. But what noone seems to notice is how subtle and subversive it is ... it's a classical microsoft, executing data - which leads to the intellectual challenge of crafting the data in a way that causes some subtle things to implode a bit further down the road. Well, noone has actually found a way to use that, so we're safe. Right?
Meh.

How to insult people (and get away with it most of the time)

Here's a nice demonstration of high-level trolling, dissected for your pleasure. It starts with a rather boring email:

I'm rewording the PMS sections on dependencies to avoid permitting
overly lax circular dependency resolution. Which of these wordings is
accurate, given that usable means "has its RDEPENDs installed and
usable"?

1. During pkg_preinst and pkg_postinst, any package dependency that is
in both DEPEND and RDEPEND must be installed and usable.

2. During pkg_preinst and pkg_postinst, at least one of the following
conditions must be met:
  a. every package dependency in DEPEND must be installed and usable
  b. every package dependency in RDEPEND must be installed and usable

Do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.

Hmm, so discussion about things is wanted. Note that it's a situation where other solutions are already deflected, let's call that "tertium non datur". This of course focusses the following discussion into a very narrow area instaed of actually discussing things.
Two emails later:

Yup, and for future EAPIs labels can fix this. But we have to have a
sound solution for current EAPIs.

This is quiet useless as a statement as (1) labels are never defined and (2) they are totally irrelevant to the discussion. But one can point people at poopludis ... sorry, paludis and all the breakage ... sorry, features it introduces. Hmm, I'm unfocussed. Why did I say poopludis?

Now some magic - let's confuse people. Two mails later:

Donnie Berkholz  gentoo.org> wrote:
> I don't think I understand the difference between the effects of
> these two options.

cat/a-1 is installed and has RDEPEND cat/b
cat/a-2 is to be installed and has DEPEND cat/b and RDEPEND =cat/b-2
cat/b-1 is installed and has RDEPEND cat/a
cat/b-2 is to be installed and has DEPEND cat/a and RDEPEND =cat/a-2

Solve this and enlightenment shall be yours!

Or a headache.

This is a futile exercise in confusing things, my uncle used to call this "Hirnwichserei". Doesn't help the discussion, but shows that academics can use hypothetical examples to show that the other side is ugly, or something.

About 4 mails later:

The specific problem is that ebuilds currently rely upon the package
manager providing circular dependency resolution that works, so we need
a good definition of just what's allowed to resolve cycles. But we
can't take "what Portage does" as that definition, because Portage's
behaviour is "usually get it right by fluke, except when things go
horribly wrong".

Mmmmh, now we're dissing portage just because we can, instead of defining a problem and/or solution. There's a reference to kdebuild a mail later, and things continue to be amusing. Here's a great one:

> Stop name dropping labels until you tell folk about what labels are.  
> I know, but I'd rather not have the notion "labels solves all"pushed 
> forth w/ out people knowing what it is, please.

Labels are already documented and discussable in the appropriate place.
This is not supposed to be a discussion about future direction. It's
supposed to be about one specific issue regarding how we word things for
current implementations. The two wordings in the original email do not
have equivalent implications, and selecting the correct one affects
whether certain problems are solvable. Let's discuss that, not what
we're going to do six years from now.

So we mention thing which we will not explain because they are offtopic. That's not in any way supporting a discussion, and why do you mention things if you know that they are irrelevant? Ah yes, I forgot. Portage bashing. (haha, bash. portage. what a pun.)

And here's the great conclusion of that thread:

Labels can be discussed on-list whenever there's a chance in hell of
Portage implementing any non-trivial new features.

Anyway, I'm going with the second wording in the original email. It
seems fairly clear that most people aren't understanding the issue, and
are jumping in and offering opinions without having looked at the tree
(and no, I'm not going to give examples, because that'll just
degenerate into "oh, so we can change this one particular case to do
$blah", whilst missing the bigger point). Of everything suggested, only
the two original wordings are correct, and of those two, the second is
better defined.

In other words, "I knew the right answer all along, just wanted to see if you've learned enough to understand it too. You didn't. Y'all fail! haha. I'm so smart". The whole thread thus degenerates into irrelevancy as the original poster reduces the whole discussion to a preconceived solution while managing to label everyone else as stupid.

Way to go, Ciara N. McCreesh. You've wasted people's time, insulted them ... and written almost 50% of the emails in that thread knowing that it is irrelevant. And you almost got away with it. Quite a nice troll, but please stop stroking your ego and other body parts in public. You're really not my type and all that. Don't get me wrong, but ... no.

As some people might have noticed there's been a small spring cleaning in Gentoo land. This has some amusing consequences:

• spb has finally been retired. He has stated multiple times that only his laziness kept him from retiring, so I bet he's happy that people finally took care of his wishes even when he was too lazy to do it himself
• rbrown has been retired too, so that's one muppet in need of something new to do. Oh well, we'll have to live without random insults ... sounds acceptable.
• Philantrop, who has shown himself to be a misanthrop, got the wrong end of the stick too. So people will have to live without silly paludis propaganda in #gentoo, trolling all over the place and overlays that won't work with portage. Sounds acceptable too.

Of course most of those affected blame everyone else now for being biased. And violating policies. And being ugly.
Strange correlation: All three were paludis propaganda specialists. Like ciaranm, who is still spamming the #-dev mailinglist with stupid things and patting his back.
Well, that's material for a new blogpost. But yes, people are biased ... against stupid. Maybe the paludis camp should work more on being cooperative instead of insulting anyone who disagrees. And maybe people would not treat them like they would an infection ...

[23:07:44] <impulze> <bonsaikitten> removing dhcp is one of the most 
stupid things one can do to a stage3
[23:07:44] <impulze> <bonsaikitten> how do you get network up without it?
[23:07:46] <impulze> priceless
[23:08:05] <impulze> that made my day
[23:08:46] <-- felipe (n=felipe@my.nada.kth.se) has quit (Remote closed the connection)
[23:09:35] <impulze> too bad eroyf isn't available atm :) it's always 
funny when those two guys are in the same room at the same time
[23:09:37] <spb> hahaha
[23:09:54] <impulze> this guy is hilarious
[23:10:02] <impulze> i never really believed it until now
[23:10:13] <ciaranm> tragic
[23:10:15] <ciaranm> not hilarious
[23:10:25] <impulze> well yea :(
[23:11:43] <aidy> why because he doesn't know how to set a gateway 
and static ip?
[23:11:59] <ciaranm> because he's a windows user
[23:12:38] <impulze> ... this guy is scary
[23:12:46] <spb> because he's a complete and utter moron

Hey guys,
It's great that you know how to use paludis, and it's amazing that you have a home network with 3 computers. I do know how to set an IP and gateway, but "192.168.0.5" and "192.168.0.1" are not valid answers.

If you only know that you are in 137.226.*, that there are three independent local networks which are mangled by a paranoid firewall and there's a good chance that you only get external connectivity when the dhcp server enables your IP at the firewall ...
Oh, there's a good chance that the admin is currently busy fixing things and you can't just ask him.

But I digress. You should not have to care about real-world problems when you have your linksys router making 192.168.0.* available and you can remember that triplet of numbers. Everyone has networks as complex as yours, and you're soo smart. Yes.

Oh, also ... not being able to downgrade gcc is a quite silly thing to do for a package manager. You might want to think about strategies to make it possible to use gcc 4.1 after compiling paludis with gcc 4.3 - otherwise people will have a strong motivation to migrate back to portage when they have to use it anyway to recompile paludis.

And if you have the time, there's a nasty exploit designed in. Better close it before someone releases a proof-of-concept and people who don't like you cause your users to be little sad sheep.

But that's irrelevant. You know best how to do things.