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Leading itemsRed Hat, Inc. filed for its initial public stock offering on June 4. Interested parties can read the official press release on the move, but said release is extremely short on any sort of substantial information. About all that can be obtained from that document is that Red Hat did, indeed, file for an IPO. What this really means, of course, is that, if all goes well, the principals of Red Hat will get rich. The company itself also gets a major infusion of money to fuel its further growth. On the first point, certainly there is nothing to complain about. The folks who created Red Hat have truly created a valuable company, and have done a lot for Linux in general. Certainly a lot of work, and a lot of committment was required to get that far. They deserve some rewards. It will be interesting, though, to see what Red Hat does with their new pile of cash. If they get what they are after - just under $100 million - their war chest will far exceed that of any other Linux distributor. It would be naive to expect them to do anything other than attempt to further entrench themselves as the leading Linux distribution. Red Hat is a business, after all, and should be expected to act like a business. The application of that kind of money could change the Linux business picture dramatically. It will be interesting to watch. Readers with a hunger for details may want to look directly at Red Hat's filing on EDGAR (thanks to Mike Renfro for the link). However, at almost 350K of straight legalese text, it can be a bit of a long slog. For those without that kind of free time, we have prepared a list of highlights of the IPO filing. There are some interesting things to be found there, including the current ownership of the company, and a list of "risk factors" that could bring them down. Plus, their future plans seem to have little to do with selling boxes of software. LinuxHQ update. LinuxHQ is back online, under new management. Meanwhile, the site formerly known as LinuxHQ, now at kernelnotes.org has dropped the LinuxHQ name and is calling itself Kernelnotes. Mixed into all this are rumors that the owner of the LinuxHQ domain name is really out looking for a deal to sell the site. It's kind of a mess. However, it is worth remembering that Jim Pick is the guy who has run LinuxHQ so well over the last few years, and he's still at it with Kernelnotes. It's the people, not the domains, that matter in the end. This Week's LWN was brought to you by:
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June 10, 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 wealth of secure distribution projects. Last week we reported on the Secure Linux project, and mentioned Kha0s as well. With another addition this week, there are now three different efforts underway to create a secure Linux distribution. They are (stealing from Rik van Riel's descriptions here):
Security Reportsipopd problems. The ipopd POP daemon distributed with Debian 2.1 turns out to have a problem that can, if properly exploited, allow access to remote persons. The Debian project has issued an updated package which fixes the problem; installing this fix is probably a good idea.UpdatesFixes for the 2.2 denial of service problem have trickled in from some of the distributions. Here are announcements from Debian, Mandrake, Caldera, SuSE, and Red Hat.Caldera has issued security updates for the kdebase and dump packages for OpenLinux 2.2 (the dump one also applies to 1.3). Upgrades are, as always, recommended. Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
June 10, 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 development kernel release is 2.3.5, released (without announcement) on June 2. There is a 2.3.6 prepatch in the testing directory, so, presumably, a real 2.3.6 release will happen shortly. The current stable kernel release remains 2.2.9, as it has been for some time. There is still no official stable kernel out there with the ICMP denial of service attack fix, unhappily (though most distributions have long since put out updated packages). Alan Cox's patches are up to 2.2.9ac4 This patch is rather smaller than previous versions - much of the more advanced stuff, which is going into 2.3, has been removed from the 2.2 patch. A new FireWire (IEEE 1394) development effort was announced by Andreas Bombe. He actually has some working code, though it is still pretty far from prime time. Details may be found in his announcement. Should the PCMCIA drivers be part of the standard kernel? This is not a new question, but it came up with a new force recently, due to some rather strongly worded messages from Linus. He is, evidently, not very happy with the current state of PCMCIA support (he said it "sucks"), and made some threats to start a new PCMCIA development from the beginning, much like he did with USB. David Hinds, the person who made PCMCIA happen on Linux was, not surprisingly, a little taken aback by these remarks. Some discussion followed on the advantages of integrating PCMCIA into the standard kernel (better tracking of kernel changes, no separate package to install) versus those of keeping it separate (ability to support new cards on all kernel versions, support for non-Linux operating systems). But the real problem came out after a bit: it seems that Linus had a tremendously difficult time installing Linux on his shiny new Sony Vaio laptop. Linus has this notion that if he has a hard time with a Linux install, at least a few other users might find it a bit daunting, and he didn't like that idea. Once the real problem was unearthed, a more solid, technical discussion followed. David Hinds outlined his understanding of the problem in this posting. The core of the solution seems not to be a full inclusion of PCMCIA into the kernel. Instead, if the kernel had enough of a minimal understanding of PCMCIA to be able to make use of devices which, at boot time, have already been initialized and set up by the system's BIOS, most of the problems would go away. A solution along these lines seems likely somewhere in the 2.3 series. (For a start, one might look at this note from Werner Almesberger, who has already implemented some of this functionality). PCMCIA shares a problem that is coming up in a number of contexts: dealing properly with hot-pluggable devices. USB, FireWire, and the new hot-pluggable PCI bus also raise such issues. The Linux kernel still, for the most part, does not deal well with this sort of dynamic environment; among other things, see the discussions on naming issues covered in the last couple of issues of LWN. Martin Mares has chimed in with a proposal of his own. He describes a device driver architecture that allows each driver to easily describe the devices it handles, thus making it easy for the kernel to choose the proper driver when a device is inserted. The ideas are currently in an early form; expect a more refined version later on. Making Linux do better on web serving benchmarks. Mindcraft will be rerunning their "Linux vs NT" benchmark on June 14, see their 'open benchmark' pagefor details. There are said to be "Linux experts" involved, though it is not clear who they are at this point. Meanwhile, Juergen Schmidt published some benchmark results of his own. In his tests, Linux and Apache beat NT in many situations, but NT wins greatly in the multiple-interface case that looks most like the Mindcraft benchmark. Some problems remain in that area. Some responses to Juergen's results include:
The end result seems to be that nobody expects much fun at the Mindcraft rematch, but that there is not a whole lot of concern about it either. In the longer term (six months, say), Linux and Apache will probably be a vastly faster web serving engine as several independent efforts to improve performance (including work by the Apache folks, of course) come together. Interesting patches and updates this week included:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
June 10, 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. |
DistributionsCorelCorel has put out an FAQ page answering some questions about their upcoming distribution. Among other things, the due date is now the end of the year, and they have no plans to open-source their big applications.DebianDebian has a new logo, which may be seen (in its "open use" form) to the right. Expect to see it popping up on web sites everywhere shortly.The Debian Policy Weekly Summary has been posted by Joey Hess. There's a number of policy changes in the works, see the summary for the status of each. One change from the posting: the adoption of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) is marked as "stalled" when, as it was decided later, there actually appears to be a consensus in favor of that change. And, speaking of Mr. Hess, Joey Hess has gotten a job at VA Linux Systems. His duties, outlined in this announcement all involve continued work with the Debian distribution and making it work better with VA's systems. Debian developers social in Paris. There is a move afoot to set up a Debian developers social meeting in Paris to concide with the Linux Expo taking place there at that time. Contact the organizer if you will be there and would like to take part. Red HatDo not use the stock Red Hat 6.0 kernels with smbfs if you are mounting shares from Windows NT, 98, or 2000 servers. This message from Michael Warfield explains why: the stock kernel has been built with a compile option that causes smbfs to only work with Windows 95 servers. All others will see corruption in the file timestamps. If you are running Red Hat 6.0 on a network with Windows servers, you will probably need to build and install your own kernel.Red Hat's FTP sites had some problems this last week. If you were attempting to obtain security updates or other good stuff and found an empty directory, give it another try. Things seem to be working again now. SuSEWho posts to the SuSE list, and what are they talking about? Here is a set of statistics on list traffic posted by David Jeffers. It turns out that quite a few of the top talkers on the list are actually from SuSE...TrinuxTrinux users who are tired of waiting for a new official release may want to have a look at the proposed 0.51 release put up by Antonio Garcia. It includes a number of new features and enhancements, all done independently of the official development process.Section Editor: Liz Coolbaugh |
June 10, 1999
Please note that not every distribution will show up every week. Only distributions with recent news to report will be listed.
Known Distributions:
Caldera OpenLinux |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Development page. |
Development toolsPerlFun with Perl is the name of a new mailing list announced this week. It appears to be intended primarily as a way of sending around interesting bits of Perl code, including bad, humorous, or obfuscated ways of doing things (as well as good stuff, of course).PythonComputer programming for everybody. Guido van Rossum, along with a few other collaborators, sent in a proposal to DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) entitled "Computer Programming for Everybody." The purpose is to make programming accessible to a much larger portion of the population through the creation of an appropriate set of tools and training materials. "We compare mass ability to write and modify software with mass literacy, and expect that equally fundamental changes to society may ensue." The language of choice, of course, will be Python. This looks to be an interesting project.The Python Way. In response to a request, Tim Peters posted an off-the-cuff set of rules of thumb that make up "the Python way." For those who are interested, they are:
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June 10, 1999 |
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Development projectsGNOMEHere is this week's GNOME summary courtesy of Havoc Pennington.Ht://DigThe Ht://Dig conference mentioned last week has been cancelled, unfortunately. There was a lot of interest in attending the show, but they were unable to get a sufficient number of developers together. They will try again in the future, perhaps in the context of some other gathering.KDEOnce again, we have the weekly KDE summary, thanks to Navindra Umanee.MidgardHere's this week's Midgard update from Henri Bergius.MozillaThe Mozilla project has put out their Milestone 6 release; see the release notes for details on how to get and install the software, as well as a summary of where they stand. Progress continues with Mozilla. There are some hopes for an official "branded" release sometime this summer, though a number of the developers seem to think that is overly ambitious.Postfix/Secure MailerWietse Venema has posted an update on the status of the Secure Mailer project. The executive summary: Postfix is seeing a fair amount of serious, real-world use, but its licensing is keeping wider acceptance from happening.PostgreSQLThe PostgreSQL team has announced the 6.5 beta release. This release "marks the development team's final mastery of the source code" they inherited from Berkeley. Included is better concurrency control, more SQL constructs, and a lot more; see the full list of changes to see all that has happened.VTadVTad is a new performance monitoring tool recently announced by Michael Blakeley. VTad is a rule-based system which watches the operation of a Linux computer, seeks out performance problems, and makes recommendations on how to fix them. It is being released under the Artistic License.WineOve Kaaven has posted a summary of Wine development events for the last week. There is some talk among the Wine developers of creating this sort of summary on a regular basis; stay tuned.Ove has also put together a Wine Who's Who page describing all of the currently active Wine developers. ZopeZope Portal Toolkit demon online. The folks at Digital Creations have put up their Zope Portal Toolkit demo on the Zope site. Note that the toolkit itself isn't yet available - they expect to put out a beta later this month. Meanwhile the demo may be interesting to those who didn't see it at Linux Expo.For the rest of the news from the Zope community, please see the weekly Zope summary put together, as usual, by Amos Latteier. 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 businessLinux Professional Institute gains sponsors. The Linux Professional Institute, which is developing a certification program for Linux system administrators, has announced a corporate sponsorship program. Initial sponsors include Caldera, SuSE, LinuxCare, Starnix, and Digital Creations; some of them are in for significant amounts of money. The LPI has, at this point, gained a lot of momentum; they seem to be well on the way toward achieving their goals. Draft SourceXchange developer agreement available. The SourceXchange has put up the first draft of its developer agreement. It is pages of legalese describing how developers will work in the SourceXchange program. They are looking for comments... A new SuSE program. SuSE has announceda new "business partner" program. "The Business Partner Program includes priority support, training, a moderated private online forum, and access to a knowledge base, among other features. Qualified Partners are those who seek to offer Linux services and want to benefefit from association with the SuSE brand." Linux Mall gets into the hardware business. The Linux Mall is now selling Linux-installed computers, in partnership with Workstation 2000. See the announcement for details. The race to the bottom continues; it is now possible to buy a $398 computer with Linux from S.A. Computer. ImageStream has announced a set of Linux-based routers. "ImageStream routers include the 'Enterprise Linux(TM)' distribution which enables network administrators to quickly and easily install and deploy high-speed LAN and WAN connections." (Thanks to Jim Ernsberger). A commercial site for open source projects. A site called XNOT has announced its existence. They intend to provide resources for open source projects: web space, mailing lists, etc. There will be a charge to the projects for this. They also intend to run banner ads, and return a portion of the revenue from the project pages back to the projects. It will be interesting to see if this works. Press Releases:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet. |
June 10, 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 busy week for Linux articles. Red Hat, predictably, drew a lot of press, but there were other things going on as well. We'll start with this week's recommended reading:
There were a few introductory articles out there. Included among them were an up and coming new category of Linux articles - the "installation nightmare" story, where we get the gory details of some reporter's installation problems.
OK, time for the Red Hat stories:
Other business-oriented articles include:
There were a few "product review" articles:
And here's all the rest:
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
June 10, 1999 |
Sections: Main page Linux in the news Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Announcements Back page See also: last week's Announcements page. |
AnnouncementsEventsThe Australian Open Source Symposiumis being held on June 16 in Melbourne. See the web page for the speaker schedule; looks like fun.Also in Melbourne: the Conference of Australian Linux Users will be held on July 9-11 at Monash University. They have put together an impressive list of speakers for this event. John Swinbank called our attention to the UKUUG Linux '99 Conference being held on June 25 and 26 in Birmingham, UK. Speakers include Ian Jackson and Stephen Tweedie. Thanks to Herbert Melgar we know about the first Philippine Linux conference entitled Linux '99. It is currently being held at the Shangri-La Hotel, Makati City, Philippines. Web sitesLinuxStart, another contender in the "Linux Portal" race, has gotten into the multilingual world with their new French-language site fr.linuxstart.com.User Group NewsThe Roanoke Valley GNU/Linux User Group will be holding an an installfest on in Salem, VA on Saturday, June 12. |
June 10, 1999
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Software Announcements
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Our software announcements are provided courtesy of FreshMeat
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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 weekOpenSec is a directory of free security software. Lots of good stuff there, it's worth a look. They also have an announcement mailing list for security-related software. Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
June 10, 1999 |
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Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to letters@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. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them. | |
Date: Wed, 09 Jun 1999 22:41:49 -0400 From: William Hoffman <whoffman@erols.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: This is the lynchpin in your enumeration of the challenges facing the RedHat IPO and the Linux community as a whole: "The GNU General Public License (GPL) might not be enforceable. This concern arises mostly because the GPL has never been tested in court." It's a coin-flip which way a conservative Supreme Court would go on the GPL. On the one hand, numerous powerful vested interests (MS only the first and most visible among them) would like to be freed from this turbulent priest. On the other hand, capital thrives on innovation that leads to lower costs and higher profits, and big software users are jazzed about Linux's MCI potential against Microsoft's obnoxious Ma Bell status. Either way, though, the game will be decided only partly in the marketplace. It may take years to settle the issue. But it is the Supreme Court, I believe, that will deal the last card. Linux supporters are not helpless in this. The more hardware and software vendors who actively (i.e., $$$) support GPL alternatives, the harder it will be for the court to uproot them. All protestations of obiesance to constitutional principle and the beauties of equal justice aside, when the day of decision arrives the Supreme Court almost always decides in favor of _net profit_. The longer GPL proponents can stall that day, the better the odds are in their favor. Yet I fear that in the rush to recruit corporate sponsors and formulate standards that will allow newbies like me to play Half Life on their laptops, the importance of this somewhat abstract yet absolutely crucial legal underpinning may be lost. And we will have to wait another generation before a similarly promising new model of collaborative property relations develops to challenge the hitherto dominant form, which appears increasingly likely ultimately to lead only to monopoly, ruin and decay. William Hoffman whoffman@erols.com | ||
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 09:07:54 +0200 (CEST) From: Helge Kreutzmann <kreutzm@itp.uni-hannover.de> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: RH 6.0 pricing Dear Editor ! One point you missed in your editorial of the June 3rd issue regarding RH's pricing are the international customers. Until 5.2 RH was priced simmilar to e.g. SuSE, making it an alternative choice. Since online time is expensive (at least here in Germany) many bought the CD set as downloading is not a real option. RH's new strategy hinders its market acceptance: The $80 set has no extra value, as long distance calles into the US are too expensive as well (and would have to be done in inconvenient times as were are several hours off US time zones); having to order directly from RH the $40 set is also inconvenient (because of the exchange, you probably need a credit card etc.). The conclusion can only be for non-US-customers: reconsider using RH. While Alpha users (like me) now have serveral choices I do feel sorry for the sparc users. My $0.02 worth Regards Helge Kreutzmann Vote against spam: http://www.politik-digital.de/spam/ Is your penguin 64 bit ? --> http://www.stud.uni-hannover.de/~helgek Helge.Kreutzmann@stud.uni-hannover.de kreutzm@itp.uni-hannover.de | ||
Date: Sat, 05 Jun 1999 07:17:32 -0600 From: Jeffery Cann <jccann@home.com> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: The future of Red Hat? Read on Lwn in 1999: The end result is that consumers of the system will not be all that put out. Even $80 is not a huge price to pay for a quality operating system. Read on Lwn in 2000: The end result is that consumers of the system will not be all that put out. Even $160 is not a huge price to pay for a quality operating system. Read on Lwn in 2001: The end result is that consumers of the system will not be all that put out. Even $320 is not a huge price to pay for a quality operating system. Read on Lwn in 2002: The end result is that consumers of the system will not be all that put out. Even $640 is not a huge price to pay for a quality operating system. I find it interesting that the opinion is that "... consumers of the system will not be all that put out." I'm put out. I'll pay $80 for Red Hat's (buggy) distribution when hell freezes over. Jeffery Cann jccann@home.com | ||
From: Decklin Foster <decklin@home.com> Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 18:06:12 -0400 To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Red Hat Core is still GPLed > Resellers of Linux, however, have more to worry about. Companies > like the Linux Mall, Linux System Labs and others, which certainly > played a role in making Red Hat the successful company that it is, > are now finding themselves squeezed on Red Hat's expensive > distribution. Evidently Red Hat's reseller price is so high that a > number of these companies are selling it at a loss. Simultaneously > they are finding themselves undercut by Red Hat itself, which is > offering a cheaper version that they can not sell. What's the point? Red Hat is GPLed, as it always has been -- there's no way that Red Hat can keep people from copying/selling their distribution unless they make everything they contributed proprietary (not likely). A cursory scan of LSL's site shows that they are still selling the GPL cd (I switched to FTPing Debian over my cable modem a while ago, so I haven't really been keeping up) -- and the pre-order is $0.00. While I don't use Red Hat myself, I don't like to see people feeding the big fear that they're going to be the new Microsoft or something (I have never worried about this, and anyone who does out to try out Debian for a minute on a spare machine.) Please try to be a little more objective. | ||
Date: Thu, 3 Jun 1999 10:51:57 +0300 (GMT) From: Roberto Alsina <ralsina@unl.edu.ar> To: editor@lwn.net Subject: Re: KDE wars I just can't believe that Nathan Myers is suggesting that the solution for a theoretical problem (namespace pollution by Qt's signal/slot/emits) is to make it a practical problem. I mean: currently there is no problem with that, since it does not collide with anything, and he proposes to actually *make* it collide. He is proposing to make the possible problems happen! That's so weird I can't even start to understand it. ("\''/").__..-''"`-. . Roberto Alsina `9_ 9 ) `-. ( ).`-._.`) ralsina@unl.edu.ar (_Y_.)' ._ ) `._`. " -.-' Centro de Telematica _..`-'_..-_/ /-'_.' Universidad Nacional del Litoral (l)-'' ((i).' ((!.' Santa Fe - Argentina KDE Developer (MFCH) An opinion you can't give reasons for is not an opinion worth having (I) | ||
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 1999 10:58:26 +0100 From: Derek <derek at fortstar dot demon dot co dot uk> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: KDE Wars I was more than a little surprised by the attitude taken by Nathan Myers in his letter to last week's LWN where he criticises Troll Tech for it's use of non standard directives in it's C++ Qt library. Firstly, this is a Troll Tech/Qt issue, not a KDE one. The KDE team are users of Troll Tech's product, and while they have an indirect say in what goes into it, they are not really in a position to start redefining Troll Tech's macros in the KDE source. Such action is bound to break things in both existing and future releases of code. Pointing the finger at the KDE developers and crying "arrogance" is unfair. While I agree that Troll Tech could have chosen less contentious names for their macros, anybody who writes library or header code is, by definition, claiming a part of the namespace. Troll Tech's claim to the 'emit' macro is no less valid than, as a random example, 'GTK_TOOLBAR_TEXT'. If I want to use that string in one of my programs, I can't, but that's hardly a major problem. Besides that, Troll Tech aren't claiming to have extended C++. The 'emit' macro, for example, is defined as empty. It's just a cue for the person reading the program, or, in some cases, the Meta Object Compiler which Qt uses as a compilation tool. My real problem with Nathan's argument is his assertion that other software developers should deliberately attempt to use these macro's names in other contexts in order to hobble the ability of users to use KDE and other Qt related software. What sort of attitude is that to adopt in the free software community? Flame wars about which products are better, and which is the way forward are all very well, but this sort of thing is just plain nasty. One thing which the KDE/GNOME war has shown is that the open source community can be an ungrateful lot. Troll Tech have donated a huge amount of work to us, but because they are trying to make a living out of their product as well, they get massive amounts of grief from those in ivory towers. Qt-2.0 is due out soon, and since a lot of work is being done on rewriting Qt based software for it, this might be a good opportunity in order to rename those macros to something a little less contentious. Anyone who feels strongly enough about the issue should make their feelings felt to Troll Tech, who might be responsive if their header files are causing genuine problems. In the meantime, deliberately trying to sabotage any software which depends on the Qt library is the sort of action which takes open source software backwards in leaps and bounds. Derek Fountain Southampton, England | ||
Date: Sun, 06 Jun 1999 23:55:05 -0400 (EDT) From: Bill Soudan <wes0472@osfmail.isc.rit.edu> Subject: A new KDE war? To: editor@lwn.net, ncm@cantrip.org I read Nathan Myers's short note on "KDE Wars" as appeared in the June 3, 1999 edition of Linux Weekly News. Normally I am fairly laid back about the KDE vs. GNOME situation, however, this article in particular caught my eye right away. Is the author trying to start a new war here? >From his note: > The solution remaining for the rest of us is to assert our right to > these names by using them freely, in header files of other > libraries, as formal argument names, struct member names, > member-function names, and as local variables in inline functions: > inline int do_stuff(int signals) { int slots; ... > We can also insert "#undef signals", etc., directives. Eventually, > as they find it increasingly difficult to build programs that rely > on useful non-KDE libraries, the KDE developers will be forced to > give up their claimed monopoly on those names, and begin to act as > responsible members of the cooperative software development > community. While the author may have a valid point, deliberately writing code with the pointed purpose of breaking Qt and KDE seems to be the wrong way to go about this issue. As a Qt programmer myself, I would gladly argue Qt's signal/slot mechanism is so well integrated into the language that it is worth losing three relatively obscure keywords. Futhermore, there are many other toolkits and applications that claim more than three generic macro keywords. When was the last time the author browsed /usr/X11R6/include/X.h? Would he code a library with the express purpose of breaking X applications by including: inline int DoStuff(bool Above) { int CurrentTime; ... I would think not, if he desired his library to be useful. Finally, would you really think of yourself as a "responsible member of the cooperative software development community" writing this type of code? If yes, please take on the other problem toolkits in addition to Qt. Bill Soudan wes0472@rit.edu | ||
Date: Mon, 7 Jun 1999 13:33:20 -0700 (PDT) From: Nathan Myers <ncm@best.com> To: wes0472@osfmail.isc.rit.edu Subject: Re: A new KDE war? Bill Soudan <wes0472@rit.edu> wrote: > I read Nathan Myers's short note on "KDE Wars" as appeared in the > June 3, 1999 edition of Linux Weekly News. ... Is the author trying > to start a new war here? No. I would like nothing better than for Qt or KDE to fix their broken headers. > ... When was the last time the author browsed /usr/X11R6/include/X.h? The macros defined in X.h are a problem, but they are an old and well-known problem. The presence of old problems does not excuse introducing new ones. Rather, we should know better, given the example. The correct solution, as for all problems of this nature, is to rename the macros according to the industry-wide convention: all upper-case, and scoped by a library-identifying prefix. If this has been done in the first place, as it is done routinely in well-behaved libraries, this exchange would not be necessary. If Troll Tech and KDE refuse to fix their own problems, they can expect continuing conflict. Using the names "emits", "signals", and "slots" in other libraries (e.g. the Linux kernel headers!) helps preserve our right to use those names, just as exercising our constitutional rights helps to preserve our freedom. Nathan Myers ncm@cantrip.org | ||