Archive for the ‘Mandriva’ Category

前幾天收到一封有點詭異的電子郵件，是來自 Mandriva 其中一個開發人員的。他在郵件中問我，要不要回去重新參與 Mandriva 的開發。那個人也大概知道，是因為 Mandriva 另一個開發人員多番侮辱，再加上不滿那種各開發人員割地分封的管理手法，我才離開的。

固然，在 internet 的世界，不用說十年人事幾番新了，一兩年已經足夠：大部分 Mandriva 的老臣子都走了 (尤其 Warly 離開得有點……醜陋)，聽聞更大部份由 contributor 管理，架構和 release 的制度都好像不同了，當初不滿意的地方，現在未必還是那樣子；只是自己現在還有沒有那種心，那種力，就是另一回事了。

My single most sane and important contribution for Mandriva is finally gone:

RCS file: /cooker/contrib-SPECS/chessbook-medium/chessbook-medium.spec,v
retrieving revision 1.2
retrieving revision 1.3
diff -u -r1.2 -r1.3
--- chessbook-medium.spec       31 Aug 2005 14:05:43 -0000      1.2
+++ chessbook-medium.spec       4 Aug 2006 23:57:53 -0000       1.3
@@ -55,21 +55,21 @@
 %prep
 if w | grep -q lmontel; then
   cat <<_EOF_
 *************************************************************************
 * WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING
 *************************************************************************
 Building this package would not be successful if lmontel logs in. Please
 wait until he logs out before building this RPM, or jobs will be simply
 killed without notice.
 _EOF_
-  exit 1
+  sleep 1
 fi

Wonder how Nanar feel like when he saw the comment. Anyway, I couldn’t care less because the fight between internal employees and contributors seems to be endless. I’m still receiving personal accusation in one of my abandoned mailbox recently, and it’s almost a whole year after I turn my head away from Mandriva. Stefan lies to me!

Finally, the last package is uploaded before quitting Mandriva contribution:


Name: libtool Distribution: Mandriva Linux
Version: 1.5.20 Vendor: Mandriva
Release: 4mdk Build date: Sat Nov 19 03:42:52 2005
......
Fri Nov 18 2005 Abel Cheung 1.5.20-4mdk
- Revert previous crappy revert that make people's life difficult


While it was Gwenole Beauchesne’s ongoing insults that triggered my determination to leave, the real reason was actually there long time ago. It looks like some of the core employees in Mandriva have their private gardens — they can do whatever they want, without considering users and contributors’ feeling. Under such environment, contributors can never do much even if they want to help. But probably THIS is the real intention from Mandriva, since those people in inner circle should have already reacted if they think this is a problem. Who knows?

Besides, under such environment, it is really becoming uncomfortable to do any contribution, since this is like dancing on sword edge — a wrong step and you will see reaction like “Damn you!”, “Don’t touch my private property!” etc.

I’m still not sure yet where to contribute, but most likely it will be Ubuntu. This recent startup has gained lots of momentum recently, especially when IBM certifies it with DB2. Besides, since Jeff Waugh has sent mail to me, so hopefully he recognizes me and lift the barrier of entrance a little bit… :-D

Finally, with Funda Wang’s help, I’m uploading unifont to Mandriva repository — that means it will be the default font for Chinese in Mandriva 2007 release. And it looks like the progress is good on Debian and RedHat’s side too: Debian is unquestionable, as Arne is debian user (developer too? I don’t know). Leon Ho is active for RedHat’s I18N issues, so he will surely follow up too. It won’t be long for other distros to pick up.

But I found it absurd when I knew those CLE people are still pushing Firefly’s bitmap fonts. While I know Firefly has put a lot of effort on it (and deserves praise), I don’t think fonts not usable globally by all Chinese can be the solution, right now. This used to be so, when there exists no unified font for Chinese, and for various languages as well (Code2001 is ahead in this area, but doesn’t support CJK, and 2002 doesn’t come close); but right now why do they still push solutions that’s only usable by themselves? Even Wen Quan Yi recognized the need, and included Firefly’s bitmap fonts with Hong Kong freefonts as well.

I learned something, which is a rule rather than exception — discussion with perfectionist often leads to nowhere. Of course, no discussion at all is also bad, and I hate those kind of person really much, like some certain people killing my job in Mandrake build cluster repeatedly without telling me, and simply yell when I approach him. But the result of discussing with people with only perfection in mind (in particular, several such persons) is only: discussion. No result, no conclusion, no action, no whatsoever. So I will upload the fonts first, and let people to sort out license in the future — the only possible outcome for unifont can only be APL or GPL or duel license, there should not be any other choice. The license for these fonts has already generated enough discussion, and as usual, nobody has a conclusion for anything. I don’t want to waste my time anymore.

When I was browsing Claudio’s ‘Smarting out Debian?’ comment [1], the following sentence caught my eye:

software packages are to be maintained, not just “packaged”

This is exactly the situation inside Mandriva — we have many abandoned packages. Why? There are of course lots of reasons, but here are 2 out of those more important:

1. Main is just yet another kitchen sink. Not much different from contrib, except that those packages in main are claimed to be ‘maintained’. Is it really so? How many packages in main are just rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt, without value-added change? (And even rebuilding is done by only 1 contributor or 2…) Many software packages from contrib are much more well-maintained than those in main. They stay in contrib just before because of second reason…

2. Main / contrib package moving can’t be done by anybody except those who are busy 24/7. So it ends up that nobody is doing anything. Some of the packages are still arguable, but some others are very obvious candidates, like xxgdb, gnome-chess and yodl. But since they are simply abandoned, their corresponding maintainers won’t put it into contrib. And nobody else can do that.

All these are not new arguments, if people dig deeper into mailing list archive they can certainly find many references and threads for this topic. Then why everytime the result is pure silence? Just because those who control everything wouldn’t allow delegation of power, and they don’t do anything or even think this is not a problem!

[1] 2007-12-02 update: Original link was http://tweek.dyndns.org:8080/blog/20050610/smarting-out-debian, but his blog is no more now…

I’ve been trying to train 2 of the open source chess engines that has self-learning capabilities, namely crafty and phalanx. And of course, I won’t miss GNU chess. I did something stupid — use a script to simulate chess tournament between various chess engines via xboard, and simply sit there, watching engines play themselves, enjoying my cup of green tea. A few comments:

• Crafty is all-around winner. Everybody knows that — no open source chess engine ever claimed it has significant chance to win Crafty.
• Phalanx, despite the fact that its last open source release is at Jan 2000, is the most tacticful out of all 3. Sometimes it evaluates piece position even more than real material. For a few moves it did surprise me. However, this tactical approach is very fatal during endgames. I’ve seen it lose under winning position! During endgames, when material difference is vital, it happily discards pawns for nothing.
• GNU chess, well, isn’t playing so badly. On average it is just losing a little bit to phalanx. However, I don’t think it is nice enough as well. Both crafty and phalanx can resign and do self-learning years ago, but gnuchess can’t even manage that right now! Let’s curse it!

Probably I’ll try packaging Sjeng Free later for Mandriva, and compare it with the other 3. And of course, scid package also needs tidying.

Disclaimer: I sucks at playing international chess, and is only a little bit better at Chinese chess.

It was about 3 months ago that, I was using Ayo-Frozenbubble bootsplash theme. Upon seeing how it boots with recent change in bootsplash code, I was so admired that, I immediately fetch my crappy camera and captured it.

I deserve it since I insist using my favorite theme at that time, despite the fact that Mandriva thinks otherwise:

if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/bootsplash ]; then
perl -pi -e 's/^\s*SPLASH=.*/SPLASH=auto/; \
s/^\s*THEME=.*/THEME=Mandrakelinux/' \
/etc/sysconfig/bootsplash
fi

After giving up immediately, i.e. joining the global family who are using default theme, I’m a happy user since then. Hiding error is better than fixing it.