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Leading itemsWho will speak for the free software community? This week Eric Raymond posted a plea for somebody to "take my job please." Therein he cites several reasons for wanting out of the free software PR business. Foremost among them seems to be the harsh criticism that he has received from some people who do not like his way of promoting free software. He feels turned upon by the people he thought he was representing. Eric doesn't really plan to quit - yet - but he is feeling some stress. (See his followup "Understand my job, please" piece for more). Part of the problem, perhaps, is simply an insufficiently thick skin. Eric perhaps lost track of the fact that, in the end, he has been playing a political game. When you play politics, you have to deal with, well, politics. It's never possible to please everybody. On the net, those who are not pleased are able to be very vocal and obnoxious about it. Combined with the fact that people without an axe to grind are generally silent, the environment looks very negative. A person who moves into a highly public position has to expect the occasional thrown tomato. The first post-"resignation" tomato came, parhaps, from Bruce Perens, who put up this piecesaying, essentially, "good riddance" and talking about how Eric may be replaced. Bruce suggests that the "single charismatic leader" position does not fit well with the free software community; he suggests a group of ten or so "interpreters," and nominates himself for one of the slots. Bruce's suggestion that there be more than one high-profile, presentable spokesman for free software maybe makes some sense. But the fact remains that Eric's retirement, if it really does happen, would not be a good thing. We, the editors of LWN, hereby ask Eric to remain on the job. Eric has done us a lot of good over the last year or so. It's been said many times that technical superiority is not enough to enable a new system to find success. The sad fact is that good PR matters too. And Eric has done a lot to publicize the advantages of the free software development process. Without him, it could well be that we would not have such a large list of companies moving toward free software. Certainly many (or most) of those companies are not where we would like them to be, but they are moving in the right direction. Who expected even as much movement as we have see so far, much less perfection? Would Mozilla, Jikes, or Zopebe available without Eric's efforts to make free software understandable and respectable to corporations? Would IBM be supporting Apache development, or SGI supporting Samba, or Corel working on WINE? Would Mexico's Scholarnet project have taken its courageous path of putting Linux systems into 140,000 schools? Some of these things would probably have happened anyway, but it's a safe bet that not all of them would have come about when they did. Eric has done free software some real good. It's silly to think that he is unable to contribute any more. It is also worth thinking, for a moment, about who would replace Eric. It would not be Richard Stallman, Bruce Perens, or anybody else acceptable to the free software purists. Much more likely, we would see free software "represented" by a paid spokesman with a corporate tattoo on his forehead. If we are lucky, it might be a Bob Young or a Larry Augustin. But companies like Corel, Compaq, Intel, and Oracle have lots of PR money, big press rolodexes, and the desire to be in that spotlight. Remember that the free software community can not elect somebody to this sort of position. The media does that. Eric's retirement is not in the interest of the free software community. Getting him some backup (or even competition), and perhaps some funding would be a good thing. But to hound him out of the public spotlight does a disservice to him personally and to free software as a whole. (See also: coverage in Wired News). Neal Stephenson has written a lengthy piece about free software. It wanders in Stephenson's usual way, but also presents some interesting insights and is good for an occasional laugh. Here's the article, we strongly recommend that you check it out. Update: this document appears to have been removed from the site, for whatever reason. Until it comes back, there are copies available on this site and also this oneout there on the net. Alan Cox interviewed, part II. Thanks to Maya Tamiya of ChangeLog.net we have an extension to our January interview with Alan Cox. Here is part II of the interview for your reading pleasure. IDC has put out a new high-priced report which sees a bright future for Linux. According to their press release: "Through 2003, total Linux commercial shipments will grow faster than the total shipments of all other International Data Corporation (IDC) covered client or server operating environments. IDC estimates Linux commercial shipments will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25% from 1999 through 2003..." Linux in London. The next in the well-respected series of Netproject conferences will be held on May 11, 1999, in London. Featured speakers include Alan Cox and Miguel de Icaza. See the conference agenda page for more information. Looks like fun, we wish we could be there... This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
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April 1, 1999
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Security page. |
SecurityNewsA report of a Linux-based "worm" showed up in this story on LinuxToday. However, discussion on BugTraq, where the message was originally posted, indicated that this was 1) not a worm, in that it does not automatically self-replicate but insteads mails back information to the author, which is then manually used in further attacks and 2) not new. For example, this CERT summary mentions that a file called "admw0rm" is known to have been found on many systems that have been successfully compromised.Most importantly, the "ADM worm", as it was dubbed, does not exploit any new vulnerabilities, but instead just searches for a large number of well-known holes that people may not have patched. So the issue here is to follow the oft-repeated security rules:
Although the Melissa Virus was not a Linux issue, you may want to note that the CERT advisory for Melissa contains information on how to configure sendmail to filter out messages that contain the virus. For more details, check out this web page. Security ReportsA vulnerability in Linux kernels 2.1.89->2.2.3 can leave a system open to a denial of service attack. This posting from John McDonald provides exact details. If you are currently running an affected kernel, an upgrade to Linux kernel 2.2.5 is recommended.A race problem in XFree86 is the focus of this advisory from SuSE, which contains a patch for the problem. It's exploitable only by local users, but probably still worth implementing. Here, also, is Red Hat's advisory on the problem. Note that not all distributions may have a vulnerable version of XFree86, (see this posting. Also from Red Hat comes updated mutt and packages containing fixes to various problems previously reported on BugTraq or by the Linux Security Audit team. Upgrades to these packages are strongly recommended. Cisco has issued an advisory covering a vulnerability in the Cisco Catalyst Series Ethernet Switches which can be used to trigger a denial-of-service attack remotely. An upgrade to the most recent version of the Catalyst switch software is recommended. More specific information is covered in the advisory, which was issued March 24, 1999. Another Cisco security issue was issued the same day and covers a problem in the Cisco Catalyst Supervisor software. It can be used by remote TCP/IP users to trigger a remote reload, causing denial-of-service during the reload. The advisory covers which Cisco models are affected and how to get a fix for the problem. ResourcesHostSentry is a new security tool for which an alpha version has been released. It is designed as a "Login Anomaly Detector", and while not yet bug-free or complete, should be stable enough to be used. For more information, check out the announcement posted by Craig H. Rowland. HostSentry is part of the Abacus Suite of freely available security tools .Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
April 1, 1999 |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Kernel page. |
Kernel developmentThe current kernel release is 2.2.5. In the announcement for this release, Linus stated his intention to take a two-week vacation. Thus, this will be the last official release for some time. The announcement also refers to the continuing egcs compilation problem, and asks for help in tracking it down. This problem is a nasty one, and could take a lot of eyes to find. With Linus on vacation, folks looking for something new to compile and boot will have to go to the "ac" series. It's off to a quick start, currently at 2.2.5ac2; this release contains the usual large file array support (still hopefully to appear in the official kernel one of these days) and a fairly long list of fixes. On the retro side, 2.0.37pre9 is out. Unless problems come up, this will become the true 2.0.37 release. For a graphical depiction of the Linux kernel version history have a look at this page put together by Larry McVoy. Aegis for kernel development? BitKeeper is the up and coming configuration management system which is expected to be at least tried for the Linux kernel development process. But now Peter Miller has stepped forward with a lengthy article on why the aegis system should be considered. The message has drawn very little response, it's not clear why. Aegis is a powerful system that might well be worth a look. A couple of patch announcements for this week:
Richard Stallman dropped another GNU/Linux bomb this week with this linux-kernel posting. Ironically, this message was posted on the Linux kernel list, where, even by Stallman's reasoning, the simple, unqualified term "Linux" is appropriate. As one would expect, much discussion resulted from this post; also predictable is that little of it was very interesting. However, Tim Smith posted a final solution to the problem that's worth thinking about... Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
April 1, 1999
For other kernel news, see: |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Distributions page. |
DistributionsCalderaA new version of the OpenLinux 1.3 "HackPak" has been released. This one has a new util-linux package which fixes some problems found in earlier releases, particularly reported NFS mounting problems.XFree86 3.3.3.1 w/ TrueType support RPMS are the latest gift from Andrew McRory to the Caldera user base. You can find them here. The OpenLinux Useability Project is new, just being started by Troy Will. The goals of the project are to improve the useability of OpenLinux. For more details, check out Troy's announcement. Note that this is not a Caldera project. DebianA belated press release for Debian 2.1 is now available in both German and English.The integrated SGML environment of Debian is the topic of this press release. Debian's innovative SGML subsystem positions Debian as a premier platform for SGML and XML developers, offering a complete working toolset for documenters and markup programmers with no manual setup required. Want to convert? A HOWTO on converting from Red Hat to Debian has apparently been around for a while. No reboot required! The Debian Weekly News is the place to find even more detailed reports on the Debian project. Here is this week's edition. Red HatRed Hat 5.2 on a Thinkpad 770X. Bill Mair has put up his website with information from his installation of Red Hat 5.2 onto his Thinkpad.SlackwareSlackware 4.0.0-beta is now available. Remember, last week's announcement was for the "pre-beta", for the truly brave. This week's version is only "beta". Changes from last week include a kernel upgrade to Linux 2.2.5, a fix for the installation from a hard drive, and various other upgrades and patches. For complete information, check the change logs, now provided from Slackware.com, so that a glut of ftp users won't keep you from finding the latest information.SuSEThe SuSE security page has been updated to include an advisory on an XFree86 hole (also mentioned in the Security Section.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
April 1, 1999
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed. |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development toolsJavaSun has put out the reference release for JDK 1.1.8, prompting at least one person to ask if anyone is working on a Linux version. No one has stepped up to claim that they are. The JDK 1.2 is apparently expensive enough to run that a stable, slimmer JDK 1.1.8 would have a place in many people's hearts for a while to come.The JDK 1.2 status page has been updated to indicate that the 68000 port has passed the Runtime VM report, the first status report from a port other than i386 or PowerPC. PerlA person with Perl knowledge and graphics sense is being sought to work on illustrations for an upcoming Perl book. If you are interested, check out this note from Ted Kennedy.PythonmxTools Version 1.0.0, an extension package for python, has been released.The first public release of PyDAS, the Python Data Analysis Servant, is now out. PyDas was written to allow "interactive statistical analysis of data", similar to S-Plus. Tcl/tkThis week's edition of Tcl-URL! is available. It mentions the release of the 1.1.2 version of Jacl and Tcl blend.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
April 1, 1999 |
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Development projectsCOASProdded sufficiently by posts to the coas list, Olaf Kirch posted a status update on the project back in February, promising a new snapshot and warning that there were problems with coas, python 1.5 and glibc. In addition, Ricardo Strusberg mentionedthat he was working on CLAMs for Apache and IP-Masquerading. Unfortunately, no additional postings have cropped up since the beginning of March.GnomeThe first public release of XSiteCopy, a Gnome-based application for "for copying locally stored websites to remote web servers" has been announced.Gnome-libs is now up to release 1.0.5, Midnight Command version is up to 4.5.29 and Gnumerics 0.21 is out. Users of Gnumerics version 0.18 or 0.19 are strongly recommended to upgrade due to a bad bug that was found and fixed. HarmonyHarmony lives! With this note on March 26, Adam Richter announced the revival of the Harmony project with its original goal: to produced a clone of the Qt libraries under the LGPL license. A new web page has been set up on a Yggdrasil server. With this status report Adam was able to report that things were looking better than he expected. A number of things already work quite well; Harmony's goal is closer than some had thought. It's an encouraging re-start; good luck to them.High AvailabilityThe High Availability web-site has been updated to contain links to Tom Vogt's udp heartbeat code. New versions of the code are expected to be pumped out almost daily, in the tradition of "release early and often". You can also get it directly on Tom's site.The Eddieware website has been relaunched and Eddie Version 1.0 is scheduled to release on May 3rd. Eddie is an open source effort to make commercial grade web servers a reality by supporting such features as global load balancing and more. KDEThe official Dutch KDE website has been announced by the Dutch Documentation Team. The address for the site is http://www.kde.nl.Eight package updates were posted to the kde-announce list, including kpackviewer-0.60, arts-0.3.0, kchess-0.1 and more. Mozilla/NetscapeThe MozillaZine newsbot is a nice way to follow interesting topics from the Mozilla newsgroups. Supported by volunteers, it contains summaries and descriptions of threads or postings, plus links back to the original articles. You'll find it at http://www.mozilla.org/newsbot/.QuasimodoFor any of you working with sound synthesizers, if you haven't run across Quasimodo, you may want to take a look. The project has been underway since November and the screenshots look interesting, but no new snapshots have been released for a while, due to reasons explained in detail on the web site.WineWine release 990328 is the latest version off the presses. It contains the usual mix of new OLE code, various improements and, as always, bugfixes. Wine Headquarters went through an upgrade on Tuesday, so if you noticed any glitches on the site, that is probably the reason.ZopeThe Weekly Zope News from Amos Latteier is now available.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh | |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Commerce page. |
Linux and businessVA Research is outsourcing most of its manufacturing, due to the fact that they can't keep up with the demand for their systems. Most of their systems manufacturing will go to Flextronics International, a company which does manufacturing for a number of other big names. VA Research plans to retain internal manufacturing for only their very high-end, multiprocessor server systems. Flextronics, meanwhile, will be setting up offshore assembly plants for the lower-level systems. See VA Research's press release and this News.com article for more. Red Hat has picked up yet another investor; this one, interestingly, is SAP. See their press release for more. SAP, being a German company, could perhaps be expected to have a more natural affinity with SuSE. The fact that they, too, are putting money into Red Hat shows the extent of the lead that Red Hat seems to be taking over the other distributions. According to This InfoWorld article, SAP bought a 10% share of the company. Multi-User Solutions has announced a 24x7 support package, this one is aimed at Caldera's OpenLinux. See their announcement for details. Gartner Group on thin servers. Stéfane Fermigier pointed out this article on thin servers put out by the Gartner Group. They evaluate a number of operating systems for this role. They seem to like FreeBSD best in the text, but end up recommending Linux for most actual applications. Proprietary systems did not come out so well. French-capable readers may want to check out this FAQ on a French government site which discusses the possible uses of free software in the French administration. A partial translation to English is available via Babelfish, but the document is far too long to translate in one shot. (Thanks to Stéfane Fermigier). Linux is moving further into the electronic design arena. Synopsys has put out an announcement that they will be offering their Verilog circuit simulation package for Linux; availability is said to be in July (though beta testers apparently have it now). CodeWarrior for Linux. MetroWerks has announced its CodeWarrior development tools for Linux, ported in conjunction with Red Hat. Pacific HiTech has announced a set of partnership programs for companies that sell products that work with TurboLinux. There are a few different levels available; see their announcement for more. Kiwis and penguins. Christchurch, NZ-based company iOpen has announced its existence to the world. They are providers of dedicated Linux systems and a number of free-software based services. They are "...dedicated to the installation of superior network services using only the most reliable software and hardware." Check them out. Press Releases:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet. |
April 1, 1999 |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Linux in the news page. |
Linux in the newsIt was a relatively light week for press coverage (by recent standards) and, in the absence of earthshaking events, there aren't too many distinct themes to point out. We'll do our best, though, starting with this week's recommended reading:
There were a few moderately technical articles out there:
"The business of Linux" was the subject of a number of articles, in one way or another.
And here's a collection of the rest of the articles we found.
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
April 1, 1999 |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsResourcesSoftware in U.K. higher education is the subject of this study, published recently. Linux is considered at length and quite favorably; they conclude that there are insufficient applications for now, but that the situation could change quickly.NetAction has put up a lengthy white paper about government support for Open Source software. It takes the position that open source software has been a primarily government-supported thing since the beginning, and calls for explicit support in the future. "What is needed is a revival of a federal government public policy that supports open source computing and strong standards that can again support the promise of open source innovation." They also say that the government should "demand uniform standards for Linux" in its own purchases. EventsHere's a press release from COMDEX hyping their spring conference in Chicago. They are presenting Bill Gates' and Linus Torvalds' keynotes as some sort of high-noon showdown between the two systems. Apparently this is "IT's most controversial event of the year."Web sitesRobert Levin has put up an essay on "Agalmics", defined as "the study and practice of the allocation of non-scarce goods." It is, of course, a study in how the free software economy works.User Group NewsIn San Diego, the Adult Education division of the San Diego Community College District will be offering two more sessions of their free, hands-on Linux classes. Caldera OpenLinux on Toshiba laptops is used for the class. Here is a note from Joe McGerald with more information and links.A Rock River area user group is forming; this area is evidently on the Illinois/Wisconsin state line. See the announcement for details. A user group for Texas A&M University is in the works, see the announcement for the full scoop. Their first meeting will be April 7. |
April 1, 1999
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Software Announcements
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Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekLooking for a nearby installfest? Or would you like to host an installfest of your own? You'll find a great deal of information and resources for would-be participants and organizers at installfest.com, hosted by the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group. SourcePower.org is the web page for what appears to be an attempt to create a free software advocacy organization. Some sort of combination of Linux International and the Open Source Initiative, but with a bit more of an activist bent. Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
April 1, 1999 |
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Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to editor@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. Opinions expresses in letters to the editor belong solely to their authors. | |
To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Re: Not quite open source Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 19:01:48 +1100 From: Peter Miller <pmiller@acay.com.au> In your feature ``not quite open source'' (http://lwn.net/1999/features/BitKeeper.phtml) you say "Larry McVoy is out to change the way cooperative software development is done, and he may just pull it off." But it's not a one-horse race. In an article recently posted to linux-kernel, I propose that Aegis (http://www.canb.auug.org.au/~millerp/aegis/) be used instead. See http://linuxwww.db.erau.edu/mail_archives/linux-kernel/Mar_99/3960.html for details. Regards Peter Miller E-Mail: millerp@canb.auug.org.au /\/\* WWW: http://www.canb.auug.org.au/~millerp/ Disclaimer: The views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily reflect the view of my employer or the views of my colleagues. | ||
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 11:12:47 -0700 From: "Dr. Glenn Butcher" <gbutcher@cos.colotechu.edu> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Re: What Linux Needs Next Mr Atkinson has identified a true need for Linux to move into the mainstream, but he's whacking on the wrong nail. The configuration files can stay where they are if we start using configuration tools that hide their locations. I've been using webmin for a couple of months now, and it provides excellent facilities for developing and including modules for any software requiring configuration. I plan on developing webmin modules for all the Linux software I develop. Abstraction can occur at many levels; the "market" will eventually gravitate to one or the other for integrated configuration... Glenn Butcher | ||
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 18:28:23 -0600 From: Dub Dublin <dub@pswtech.com> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Registry isn't inherently evil In reading the many responses to Tom Atkinson's letter suggesting that Linux needs a configuration database (CDB), I noticed that many people are opposed to the idea of a MS Registry-type thing without exactly knowing (or at least cogently stating) why. At the risk of being accused of defending Microsoft, I'd like to point out that it's important to draw a distinction between the concept of a fast database to store and index critical OS and application configuration information and Microsoft's specific implementation of the concept. I argue that the Registry/CDB *as a concept* is a good and valid idea. I also argue that the rat bag of incompatible and inconsistent Registry entries has failed for *exactly the SAME reason* that the rat bag of incompatible and inconsistent Unix config files has failed: lack of any agreement on how to use the things! In principle, the Registry concept has a lot going for it: it's fast, compact, easily accessible (well, sort of), highly optimized by some programmer other than the one calling it, etc. The problem is that Microsoft never adequately specified how it was to be used (and, of course, no one else could, either.) As a result, many applications use configuration parameters that *should* (in a good architecture) be keys under, say HKEY_CURRENT_USER, but are actually implemented as keys under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or something similar. It's this sort of ambiguity over what the registry is intended for and how it should be used that has left it in the sorry state it's in today. Every application developer does that which is right in his own eyes, with little regard to what might happen if, say, the application is served rather than local, or used by multiple users simultaneously. (ref. Proverbs 12:15 <g>) It's this sort of short-sightedness that can make things like running a "test" version of an application on an NT machine that also has a "production" version loaded a very challenging excercise - even though this is pretty trivial in Unix.. As for stability, it's true that a CDB represents a critical single point of failure, but then so do filesystem FATs - and we don't seem to mind that much anymore. If properly implemented, CDBs would have reliability features such as journalling, integrity checking, etc. that would allow graceful reconstruction of a munged CDB. Again, the Windows registry falls short of the mark, but a poor implementation should not damn the entire concept. We need to set aside the anti-registry bias and seriously look at what forms a CDB might take, and what value it might have to the community at large. ***More importantly, much of the key tree needs to be well mapped out in advance so that there are predictable and reasonable locations and formats for OS and application data.*** At the risk of starting a flame war, this is one place where infinite malleability and extensibility may be suboptimal. Such constructs tend to become the only ones used by lazy programmers, leading to a tragedy of the commons in which there is a standard format which (thanks to an extensiblity hook) has unused standard entries and beaucoup proprietary data. Witness IGES type 102(?) "copious data", the SNMP "enterprise MIB" tree, HL-7 extensions, etc. Ultimately, these just produce a legion of proprietary formats shoehorned into an awkward "standard" wrapper, resulting in what is arguably the worst of both worlds. (Interestingly, XML may provide a very useful mix of exensibility and self-explanation, even though it's very malleable.) As an interesting aside, I think it is exactly the "pre-thunk" attributes that have made the Macintosh implementation of this (essentially a CDB in the resource fork of every file) arguably the most successful implementation of the function to date. In spite of a relatively clunky file-by-file storage structure, the keys and value formats are well known and understood, and can be shared and used freely without worry. The value to the user/programmer comes from the consistency, predictablity and organization, not from ease of access, or even speed. I look forward to a time when Linux has a powerful, flexible, and *predictable* mechanism for holding OS and application config information. The exact implementation mechanism is much less important than how well-thought-out it is in other respects. (Personally, I'd prefer some sort of persistent object store, since it maps well to the real world and inheritance would be handy, but it really doesn't matter...) Dub Dublin dub@psw.com | ||
From: Alex Shnitman <alexsh@hectic.net> Date: Sun, 28 Mar 1999 17:45:25 +0300 (IDT) To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Re: What Linux needs next Hello, Last week a lot of people wrote in with responses to Tom Atkinson's article that suggested a central binary "registry" for storing all the configuration data of all the programs. Most of them compare the idea to Windows' registry, and reject it on that basis. They miss one thing. Don't ever confuse the idea with the implementation. You are right that the registry, in the way it's implemented in Windows, is a nightmare. But that doesn't mean that the idea sucks, it only means that the implementation sucks. Perhaps it isn't a good idea to store all the entries in one file (that can easily get corrupted). And perhaps there needs to be a better structure for the registry, one that is designed very carefully to be easy to clean (or rather hard to get bloated in the first place), and that doesn't acquire slack over time. But don't discard the idea on the basis of one if its implementations. Having said that, I do agree that strictly a *binary* database isn't a good idea. In my opinion the approach taken by KDE and GNOME is the best. The configuration remains in text, but there's a unified API for accessing it. Thus, it's still script-processable, and yet GUI- manageable and consolidated. The configuration of each program is stored in its own file, so it's not easy for the database to get corrupted. You see - we don't have to invent anything new. Perhaps more programs should be written with the KDE or GNOME libraries, even if they don't use Qt/GTK or are not even graphical. Then again there's the KDE/GNOME conflict, but reducing the configuration to *two* databases is certainly better than what we have now. -- Alex Shnitman | http://www.debian.org alexsh@hectic.net, alexsh@linux.org.il +----------------------- http://alexsh.hectic.net UIN 188956 PGP key on web page E1 F2 7B 6C A0 31 80 28 63 B8 02 BA 65 C7 8B BA | ||
From: "Greg Owen {gowen}" <gowen@xis.xerox.com> To: <editor@lwn.net> Subject: Re: replacing flat text config files with a database Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 10:55:18 -0500 Art Cancro writes: > The configuration database that Mr. Atkinson proposes is, >essentially, the Windows Registry. Anyone who has had even minimal >experience with the administration of Windows systems knows that >it's quite easy for the registry to become corrupted, or (perhaps >even worse) loaded up with defunct settings for programs which are >no longer installed on the system. The fact that Microsoft did it poorly should not be taken as an indicator that it can't be done right. Isn't that the Linux motto? ;> What Mr. Atkinson proposes, in short, is replacing a flat-file database, with all its parsing and lookup headaches, with a reasonable database backend. I think the advantages in speed, performance, and reliability are potentially quite large. The largest obstacle is not in building a good system, but in making various packages that have been using crappy config files for 20 years compatible with the new system. Such a system, built from the ground up, could target the problems of the Windows Registry and learn from Microsoft's mistakes: 1) Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. Build the system to beat corruption. Microsoft didn't do it, but nobody said it can't be done! 2) Cleaning. The RPM system manages to do a reasonably good job of protecting the filesystem from cruft, and if the system is a database, it is perfectly designed for keeping the associated information required to clean up. 3) Fix the obscurity problem. For example, each key has an associated help entry that describes what it does and what forms of values it takes, and have it do some sort of checking on the entry to see if it complies. That, to me, represents an improvement over reading flat-file examples and 5 man page entries, then searching the web to see an example of someone else's syntax. 4) I don't know what the Registry does for layers of permission, but that's something that should be thought about too. Is there a mailing list appropriate for discussing this idea? Is anyone else interested in doing the thought experiment of picturing how such a system could be designed? Let's spend some thought on it and see what we come up with. -- gowen -- Greg Owen -- gowen@xis.xerox.com -- gowen@scansoft.com Please note my new gowen@scansoft.com address which will become my default address in March, and which works now. | ||
From: nride@us.ibm.com To: editor@lwn.net Date: Thu, 25 Mar 1999 12:12:48 -0700 Subject: Re: What Linux Needs Next I, like many others, feel that a single binary "registry" would not be the way to go with Linux. I've seen the effect of such things on other systems (Windows and OS/2) and they generally hide information from the user that should be easily accessable. I also agree with many of the other people who wrote on this topic that a single unififed format for the various files in /etc would be a great idea. Not only is it difficult to remeber the various formats (The only thing that seems to stay constant is that # starts a comment) but a lot of programmers are wasting a lot of time writing parsers for their servers. What I suggest (And will try to work on in my copious spare time *snort*) is a migration to XML format. Intead of /etc/sendmail.cf, you'd have /etc/sendmail.xml. There are lots of tools available now to do parsing of XML data and the language is ideal for this sort of thing. In addition if it's done correctly, system configuration for the average user should be as simple as pointing mozilla at /etc. You could also write a file that each server could register in to which would contain the server name, some info about it, and the name of its config file. If we really wanted to get clever about this we could write a tool that would import a DTD or schema and output a C header file with structures that you could read directly into. You could then use some library routines to import your data as needed. I'm trying to get a push on to start work on this but I don't currently have a central location from which to coordinate something like this. Perhaps someone else would like to start a project page? I'm planning on working over my weekends and nights and hope to start by moving the init file format to xml. It would be nice to have a central dumping ground for patches though. -- ---------- Bruce Ide nride@uswest.net | ||
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 1999 10:53:18 -0600 From: Craig Goodrich <craig@airnet.net> To: bruce@perens.com Subject: ESR's Leadership ... [ref http://perens.com/Articles/Evangelist.html ] Bruce, I agree with your editorial's conclusion that it would be more healthy for the open software movement to have several prominent speakers to act as ambassadors to the curious alien culture on Planet Suit, rather than placing that burden on any one person. The difficulty, though, is that basically what we refer to as the "movement" or the "community" really _has_ no leader, at least not in the sense that the commercial (much less political) world uses the term. We're a spontaneous order, and when we call ourselves followers of ESR or RMS, that's simply a shorthand way of characterizing our own individual philosophical orientation vis-a-vis some of the licensing and advocacy issues currently being debated within the community. (At least, that's what it means among the grownups who express themselves in the mailing lists, newsgroups, and such fora as Slashdot.) It's not as though the community itself elected anyone by anything like a formal (or even informal) process. What happened was that ESR wrote a very perceptive and original paper -- "C & B" -- contrasting two different approaches to the technical probem of software development, _both approaches being within the "open software" tradition_, and pointing out the practical advantages in productivity, reliability, etc. of the bazaar method. Hackers for a commercial software company found the paper, decided it was relevant to their company's current problems, invited ESR to speak at Netscape, and the rest is history. If anyone appointed ESR spokesman, it wasn't the hacker community at large, nor ESR himself. It was just what happened, and the press, wondering what it was all about, gravitated towards ESR since he was the most visible source of information. And this became self-reinforcing: press coverage leads to more press coverage as the name becomes better-known. So ESR was faced more and more with a choice between a) pulling a Marlene Dietrich and retiring quietly to his machine in Pennsylvania, or b) accepting an expense- paid week in some fascinating place in exchange for talking to suits. (I know the choice I would have made, and I'm pretty much burned out already....) Basically, I think, if ESR really wants to step out of this role, all he would have to do is start saying "Sorry, I can't make it, but you might want to contact Fred or Bruce or ...." when invited to speak. And he probably will eventually, when in his personal judgment the conditions are right -- although it's doubtful, at least to me, whether this position can actually be passed on by primogeniture or apostolic succession; only time will tell. But in the meantime, would-be bureau speakers don't have to convince the hacker community of their talents (except possibly Eric). We could unanimously vote somebody Supreme High Long Integer and it wouldn't make much difference to the audience ESR is reaching. The ones to convince are the press and the suits. Craig ============== Craig Goodrich Rural Village Systems somewhere in the woods near Huntsville, Alabama Politics for the Thinking Redneck -- http://airnet.net/craig/g4c Linux miscellany -- http://airnet.net/craig/linux ------------- Though my heart be left of centre, I have always known that the only economic system that works is a market economy, in which everything belongs to someone--which means that someone is responsible for everything. It is a system in which complete independence and plurality of economic entities exist within a legal framework, and its workings are guided chiefly by the laws of the marketplace. This is the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself. -- Vaclav Havel _Summer Meditations_ | ||