In the olden days, things were a bit simpler. Oh, things were far from perfect; we didn't all have the same levels of access. We all had access to the machine with the ftp archive master, but Only a few people had access to the mailing list server, and only a few people had root (though not all of them were German). I actually had root on a couple of buildds until some guy named Ryan Murray appeared out of nowhere and disabled my accounts. I remember wondering, at the time, who he was and how he had gotten root on everything.

As the years went by, the disparity grew. Like the lie told by the illuminati of post-9/11 thinking, things need to be kept safe, so access started to be less of an entitlement and more of a needs-only privilege. It just so happens that you don't need to do anything. However, the people who actually deserve the access can provide alternate services for you in case you want to try something you don't deserve access to. Of course it won't be as good, and if it breaks you may be called an impatient ingrate if you complain. Then if you want something else, you are asked to justify it. It is extremely condescending for a power-hungry, power-hoarding person to demand to know why someone should have access to something. The two main factors in gaining power are such a craving and cronyism, and if you remember that power is relative, you can see why a power-hungry person would not wish to participate in an egalitarian society, and why anarchy is unstable and falls easily to syndicalism.

Back on the bus, we now have more layers of access, and thus we end up with more classes of people. As people and machines multiple, there are more opportunities to deny people access to machines, and more instances in which one could inquire why someone needed access to something. In this new Enlightenment, it is not just the power-mad asking the question, but also some hangers-on and other people who do nothing useful. There was some overlap of the two groups.

Like everything else that doesn't get struck down violently and immediately, these attitudes become the standard, and people insist that any other choice would lead to instantaneous destruction of the universe. Look at how Anthony Towns redefined the meaning of experimental to work around a technical shortcoming. Now, instead of acknowledging the fact that there's a major deficiency in the release process that makes it inconvenient to upload packages to unstable during a freeze, and trying to fix it, we all mostly misuse experimental.

Now we couldn't log into ftp-master, and we couldn't log into half the other machines either, but we could always upload. Even when the release team was giving us the bad advice not to upload, we could still do it. This vexed them, so the privileged ftp-team granted the privileged release team additional privileges. Can you guess what they were? I don't think I could. It's practically unfathomable to me. The release team can block a developer's right to upload. This is the fundamental building block of the whole kit and caboodle. Everything is predicated on this basic action, and their new privilege is the power to take that away from us. Yet this was greeted with very little objection, probably because of the people involved and vague promises of well-meaning and non-misuse.

However, there is a simple axiom which applies to all of this:

If you impede me doing something I want to do, you are an asshole.

So now we can still upload (except when a bribe-loving ftpmaster is being petty or when the release team is expediting a transition) and we can still vote, and we can log into a machine or two. We're running low on powers to take away. Maybe we could create an even lower class of citizen, some kind of undermaintainer without any voting rights.

Whee. DM was born. Instead of fixing the problems of class inequality, we created another class. Fantastic.

Why stop there? Why not create more? Clearly nobody wants to work toward an egalitarian culture, so we might as well make it like a game where you can hop from level to level. Then you can go to society parties and brag that you are a DVMRP-Q White Belt Green Stripe with a concentration in Taiwanese Bug Reporting, and that after a 6-month wait you can make a lateral move to second-chair cantor of Der Process under the wavy waves.

As always, making the constructive suggestion to take things in the exact opposite direction will be called out as unconstructive.

Once there was a professor, and they assigned a paper on epicene singular they in common usage around their school. One student interviewed other students as part of their research, and another student cited their paper as part of their research. They handed in their papers on time, as did most of the rest of the students, and the professor graded them. There was a hint of plagiarism in them, and they didn't know what to do about them. In the end, they appealed to the Academic Integrity Committee, and they discussed the matter with them.

Some of the them redefined success. They said that they reaped the benefits of flexibility, whether political or not, and that they did not suffer from problems of ambiguity or sounding illiterate. They, but not all of them, also said that prescriptive grammar was oppressing them, and that evidence of epicene singular they from the Middle Ages was clear basis for belief that subjunctives were dead and that they were only used by sticklers and language bigots. They maintained that they were keeping them down. The grades did not necessarily reflect this. They could infer from them that they had seen a world where they could use several anonymous antecedents of varying gender and number, and they would not need to use artificial gender-neutral pronouns when they could just rely on good and proper epicene singular they. They knew that once language shaped thought enough, there would be no need to expend the extra effort to clarify the doubts introduced by them using the same word to mean fifty different things, because they would just know what they were saying.

They didn't care at all that it sounded incredibly stupid. They only cared that they were right.

The worst thing an idealist can be is practical. I see this problem nearly every day when people are trying to comply with laws, rules, regulations, standards, or what-have-you. You fail to meet the objective, so you smudge reality and make compromises. Well, we cannot reasonably drive under the speed limit so let's arbitrarily make up our own limit (10 mph over) and stick to that. That way we endure the hardship of having to comply with something but not the extreme and unattainable hardship of complying with the real thing. Nevermind that some people actually obey the speed limit; that's just anecdotal evidence or a fluke or some other excuse you can use to disregard the fact that what you are claiming is impossible is actually possible.

That's an example of a rule mandated by an external power (the oppressor you theoretically owe your allegiance to or the oppressor you are on loan to). Where idealism really comes into play is when people choose their own oppression, be that a formal religion, moral code that they got from a pamphlet somebody was handing out on the sidewalk, or other voluntarily-adopted standards of behavior.

Then you end up with raw-food vegans who eat pepperoni pizza twice a week, environmentalists who drive cars, PETA members who keep pets, feminists who are lapsitters, Christians who sin, people who claim that things are best-effort, and people who claim that things that are obviously part of other things are not really part of those things.

Dear Lazyweb (and Andres):

Why are Ian Murdock, Eben Moglen, and Pamela Jones supporting a company that tries to extort another company? Is it because actually filing suit is more evil than threats? Why shouldn't they both burn in hell? kthx.

El año pasado 1,944 neoyorquinos vieron algo y dijeron algo. Gracias por mantener tus ojos y oídos bien abiertos. Y no guardar tus sospechas para ti mismo. Si ves algo, di algo! Habla con un policía o con un empleado de la xxx. O llama al 1-888-xxx-xxxx

buxy is on the wrong track.

DSA is a fundamentally-flawed organization; all of the self-selecting “committees” in Debian are: you cannot have a functional and respectable subgroup if it maintains autonomy like that.

The solution to the current set of problems that have been plaguing us for years is not to have backroom discussions and negotiations. It is not to add MORE team members, because that will, at best, achieve minor performance improvements. At worst, that will bolster its structural problems.

To fix DSA cleanly and healthily, the honorable members need to resign, and Debian needs to fire the rest. Attempt anything else and you will likely become part of the problem.

This one is long and boring. You'll want to skip it entirely.

A while ago, Ulrich Drepper made getaddrinfo() in GNU libc behave according to an IETF RFC. Sounds sane, right? Well, not entirely. The way RFC 3484 rules work for IPv4 is less than ideal. On the other hand, returning network address query results unsorted is also less than ideal. Imagine if getent passwd returned lines in a randomized order. It would be perfectly functional, but piss me off to no end until I conditioned myself to always sort them the way I wanted them. I digress.

So, we shipped a stable release that behaved this “new” way. Nobody objected. I don't know if Ubuntu did or not. It would amuse me if they did, but I don't much care.

Then all of a sudden, along comes bug #438179. The gist is that Kurt thinks that trying to make intelligent decisions based on network topology is a bad idea because “it defeats the point of having multiple A-records in the first place.” We'll come back to that in two minutes. James filed the analogous bug in Ubuntu. I keep mentioning Ubuntu for a reason. I'm not going to tell you what that reason is.

The GNU libc maintainers were reluctant to change the default (which is how most other modern operating systems behave; MacOS X being a notable exception, though I heard that they were working on it), so Kurt escalated to the Technical Committee. Now nothing in our lovely and flawed Constitution says that the tech-ctte should be a technically-capable bastion of wisdom and patience; I just think it does because I don't waste my time reading Foundation Documents that don't accurately describe our governance structure.

Now for a brief interlude while I vamp incoherently for some of my less technical readers who are not implementors of a DNS resolver libraries, past IETF participants, DNS administrators, someones who've followed some of the IPv6 transition work, or have invented the Internet lately: Round-robin DNS is a giant hack, a poor man's loadbalancer, as it were, something that only works due to a de facto standard that no standards bodies seem to have thought worth preserving. gethostbyname() has been marked obsolescent in POSIX and deprecate in GNU libc for what seems like forever, and the GNU libc implementation of it suffers from bugs that probably no one should ever fix, and as such, no one should ever use it. getaddrinfo() is not a drop-in replacement for gethostbyname(), and expecting it to behave the same is daft. If it were meant to behave the same, I would expect that it using it would be simply a matter of changing calls to gethostbyname() to getaddrinfo(), rather than the amount of code rewriting you need to do now to change the same effect. Furthermore, nothing guarantees the behavior of gethostbyname() except for years of observed consistent behavior and the expectation that should anyone implement a C or resolver library that sorted gethostbyname() results, there would be much loud screaming that it was the library that's broken, and not the applications or programmers for being naïve.

I hope that was less than helpful. Let's move on with the plot.

While the Technical Committee “deliberated”, and I use the quotation marks because several -ctte members don't seem to have participated at all, Ian Jackson jumped up and down like some kind of Rumpelstiltskin, screaming that he is Der Komissar and that voting is in order, and a few other things I won't mention. On the 20th of September, Ian Jackson called for a vote. On the 20th of September, Ian Jackson uploaded an Ubuntu version of glibc with the default changed. On the 20th of September, my mother had trouble sleeping, though I suspect she has no idea it was because of this debacle.

This story has no ending. Let the rain come down.

Dear Sirs and/or/but Madam:

Kindly write a free clone of Syndicate Wars.

Maintenant j'ouvre la fenêtre et une mouche la chambre entre
Ni la moche ni l'italienne ne peut être trouvée plus à son centre

This place with its wood and its shingles, this place
with birdshit splattered down the bricks
This place with drunken girls screaming Meat Loaf lyrics
and behaving like abject pricks

Maintenant je suis bien loin
But yet oh so close
Cerca de la criatura del lago
Not Iago as has been previously claimed

Humming, screeching, gurgling, squeaking
Not unlike Barbie's mom on a Thursday night
It goes through the motions of accomplishing something
When really it is advancing its own sinister agenda
An agenda so sinister that you'd name it Dexter if you could.
You can't.

Then, as the disruptive forces destabilize reality, like
they destabilize the rhyme and scansion and hyperlinklessness
of
This Poem

Then, like
Mike Stone
expressing
gratitude,
like something demanding its $3.50 (but oh, oh, it does not want its $3.50; it wants
something far more visceral and ephemeral), it makes a simple statement.

F01.

Natuurlijk.

This makes me smile.

The DM GR and the discussion surround it do not make me smile.