Does YDL use unreleased/buggy redhat-versions of KDE and XFree86?

[nathan r. hruby]

On 26 Mar 2003, Markus Deistler wrote:

> 
> Nice to hear that from you, my trust in RH and everything that is based
> on RH (eg. YDL) was heavily shaken by that website I mentioned before
> (http://www.mosfet.org/noredhat.html).
> 

For the record, Mosfet's kind of a crank :)  

And to clear up another mis-conception: The GPL doesn't say you need to 
send your patches back to the original author, simply make them publicly
availible so there's nothing "wrong" with anyone distributing a hacked 
version of some other program, so long as the changes are availible in 
source form.  This of course pisses off original authors to no great 
extent so many of them rant, rave and bemoan it.  Most OSS projects are 
this way -- I think it's human nature: people get overly excited about 
pretty mundane shit sometimes.

Also, The fact that you can grab a .src.rpm and have all of the changes in
patch form to a known pristine version of the source means that there
ain't nothin' hidden from you, the original author, or anyone else.  

The "Black Magic" in RPM Dan Burcaw refered to eariler was a mention of a
portion of the RPM API that was undocumented and did strange things in
order to make a upgrade-intall in the RedHat installer work (not correctly
mind you, but just go).  I imagine it would be similar to adding --force
--nodeps to the entire package transaction.  This is one of the really 
hard things about upgrades, there's no way to truly rationalize a system 
to a new state, espically after a user has gone and ripped out half the 
dirsto packages and installed their own (eg, Xfree, Gnome2.2, KDE3.1, 
xxms, Xine, Ogle, apache, php, etc..)  at that point there's no easy way 
to make rpm work in the constraints of it's own rules, so RPM needs to 
break them - hence 'Black Magic Voodoo'.

I hope this clears up some points that I think were getting a bit confused 
in the thread.

-n

-- 
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nathan hruby <nathan@drama.uga.edu>
computer services specialist
uga drama
http://www.drama.uga.edu/support/
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