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Would you leave the current Gentoo for a D.Robbins led "Gentoo fork"?
Yes
49%
 49%  [ 194 ]
No
43%
 43%  [ 168 ]
Only if he retains and uses the Gentoo trademark to form a "New Gentoo".
7%
 7%  [ 28 ]
Total Votes : 390

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tld
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 6:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

omnio wrote:

I agree. Also, while many of us are enthusiasts or hobbyists, some of us actually DO use gentoo on their servers to provide services, and often can't afford to spend their time wondering what happened during the last update since some things don't work anymore (even though they reviewed the emerge logs and never went ~ARCH), or what caused such a scary breakage that even revdep-rebuild can't handle. They simply can't afford that.

Exactly what distribution is it under which it's safe to upgrade a live server, let alone critical one, without testing in on a sandbox machine?

Tom
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 6:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

tld wrote:
omnio wrote:

I agree. Also, while many of us are enthusiasts or hobbyists, some of us actually DO use gentoo on their servers to provide services, and often can't afford to spend their time wondering what happened during the last update since some things don't work anymore (even though they reviewed the emerge logs and never went ~ARCH), or what caused such a scary breakage that even revdep-rebuild can't handle. They simply can't afford that.

Exactly what distribution is it under which it's safe to upgrade a live server, let alone critical one, without testing in on a sandbox machine?

Tom


You're making a very good point. This is something I should have done and it's my fault I didn't. But to have a huge outage because something like expat broke and I couldn't fix it with a revdep-rebuild, and to be forced to go to IRC and ask what happened, well ... Makes me wonder, while it's my duty to test stuff on a sandbox machine, it's not also someone else's duty to test it before delivering it to users' machines. Now I'm also aware that I'm not a person having the nerves in a best shape ...
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 7:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

omnio,

There was a lot of agonising on the -dev ml over expat.

From memory, both the new KDE and GNOME needed it and for some reason it could not be slotted, anyway gmane will have the blow by blow account. It was the major issue it became as so many things depend on it.

I've not looked into what happened with the ABI that made it break, to see if it could have been avoided but its what libexpat upstream decided to to.
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 7:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

NeddySeagoon wrote:
omnio,

There was a lot of agonising on the -dev ml over expat.

From memory, both the new KDE and GNOME needed it and for some reason it could not be slotted, anyway gmane will have the blow by blow account. It was the major issue it became as so many things depend on it.

I've not looked into what happened with the ABI that made it break, to see if it could have been avoided but its what libexpat upstream decided to to.


Neddy, I understand that these things can't be avoided, especially when running a source based distro. What I'm referring to is that it would have been nice to have (at that time), along with the expat upgrade, an emerge log/warn/info/whatever to provide the fix. Or a shiny helper script.
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 25, 2008 9:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

omnio,

Point taken. In fact, mzot in #gentoo will provide just such a script but it was written after users flooded #gentoo with the expat issue.
It could have been produced before hand.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 12:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

omnio wrote:
batistuta wrote:

Ok yeah, I'll tell you!!

I want a distro that gives a branch which doesn't break every day (although I like the idea of celebrating every time an update world doesn't crash), and that this branch is also up-to-date. So I want something like freebsd gives you in testing, or what Gentoo used to give me two years ago.


I agree. Also, while many of us are enthusiasts or hobbyists, some of us actually DO use gentoo on their servers to provide services, and often can't afford to spend their time wondering what happened during the last update since some things don't work anymore (even though they reviewed the emerge logs and never went ~ARCH), or what caused such a scary breakage that even revdep-rebuild can't handle. They simply can't afford that.

What you're talking about sounds a lot like the frozen tree idea. It requires a fair amount of time to maintain backports to the tree. I guess you could do it with glsa-check maybe?
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 2:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

From my point-of-view as "just a Gentoo customer," this is a tempest in a teapot. But a potentially harmful one to my interests as a customer of Gentoo.

I kindly suggest to you all that you resolve whatever "petty personal differences" you may have and figure out how to make the Gentoo product better for the customers who, although they did not "buy" it, nevertheless rely upon it to do their daily work (or to earn their daily bread).

Nothing else matters.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 2:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

sundialsvc4 wrote:
Nothing else matters.

Caveat emptor. GPLv2 sections 11 and 12, but thats purely a technical dividing line whereas most humans would set forth a more tolerable response.

From a programmers perspective, I believe there are other things that matter.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 4:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

sundialsvc4 wrote:
From my point-of-view as "just a Gentoo customer," this is a tempest in a teapot. But a potentially harmful one to my interests as a customer of Gentoo.

I kindly suggest to you all that you resolve whatever "petty personal differences" you may have and figure out how to make the Gentoo product better for the customers who, although they did not "buy" it, nevertheless rely upon it to do their daily work (or to earn their daily bread).

Nothing else matters.

You're not a customer of Gentoo, since you don't pay for it. And a whole load of other things do matter, actually, such as: the Community, the atmosphere we collaborate in, and the Freedom to use the software how we want, and to modify it if it doesn't quite do what we want.

Even if I paid a small amount of money per year to support Gentoo, I still would not see myself as a customer; it would be a minimal contribution to help support the development process. We're users, and since this is Free software, we can collaborate as much or as little as we want to help make the software we use better. You mention your daily work, and admonish people to sort themselves out so you can continue to earn; using their work for nothing. No offense, but it sounds awfully selfish, and not at all in the spirit of the project imo.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 5:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

sundialsvc4 wrote:
From my point-of-view as "just a Gentoo customer," this is a tempest in a teapot. But a potentially harmful one to my interests as a customer of Gentoo.

I kindly suggest to you all that you resolve whatever "petty personal differences" you may have and figure out how to make the Gentoo product better for the customers who, although they did not "buy" it, nevertheless rely upon it to do their daily work (or to earn their daily bread).

Nothing else matters.


I for one would have no issue with selling you a support contract. Remember while you might earn your daily beard from gentoo, we developers don't necessarily. I work at a completely linux free workplace, 8hours a day with 1-3 hours of travel a day, 5 days a week.

Also you should remember that gentoo gives you complete freedom to break your own system. Therefore I hope you are running arch, have no ~arch packages, etc, etc, etc, hell lets throw in that you shouldn't have any addition USE flags enabled/disabled ( just hang with your profiles set ).

Gentoo is a "meta distribution" you are your own developer and customer.

alistair.

ps. sundialsvc4 there is no point having quotes around the word buy, as you did not [no-quote]buy[/no-quote] it.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 5:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

steveL wrote:
What you're talking about sounds a lot like the frozen tree idea. It requires a fair amount of time to maintain backports to the tree. I guess you could do it with glsa-check maybe?

That's a pretty good idea, actually (versioning the tree). Though it does pose some logistical problems (upgrade to the next release or back into the moving tree), it's a reasonable way to get off the rolling release treadmill without going all the way to the nearly ubiquitous punctuated-release-only model. The approach seems to work well enough for many software projects that maintain a quasi-stable main branch under continuous development and peel off a stable snapshot when the time seems right. As pointed out in the thread, it's easy enough to use personal or community overlays to keep up to date with apps/packages one is interested in. Too bad the conversation went downhill so quickly ...
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 9:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'd like to apologize for flooding this thread with my problems. I agree that just expressing bitterness doesn't leave too much room for discussing ideas and improvement.

Last edited by omnio on Sat Jan 26, 2008 3:45 pm; edited 1 time in total
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 11:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, everything seems to be sort of solved now. A new post on Daniels blog indicates that he won't fork Gentoo but wants to kind of help out in some way or another as good as he can. On the Gentoo side there are new activities going on like preparations for an election of trustees etc..
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 3:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

c0d3g33k wrote:
That's a pretty good idea, actually (versioning the tree). [...] Too bad the conversation went downhill so quickly ...

Looks mostly civil to me. If you're implying that the idea hasn't flown simply because people aren't willing to give it due consideration, that seems rather unlikely when you consider that discussion about the idea has been ongoing about six years now. :-) See e.g. Daniel Robbins promising the world that Gentoo would have such a tree "soon" back in May '02.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 5:45 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Syntaxis wrote:
c0d3g33k wrote:
That's a pretty good idea, actually (versioning the tree). [...] Too bad the conversation went downhill so quickly ...

Looks mostly civil to me.

It was, though the term "mostly" is telling. I argue that there is no place for incivility in a technical discussion at all. It doesn't take much to derail things if one knows what buttons to push. Anyone who has attended a family holiday get together has probably witnessed this.
Syntaxis wrote:
If you're implying that the idea hasn't flown simply because people aren't willing to give it due consideration, that seems rather unlikely when you consider that discussion about the idea has been ongoing about six years now. :-) See e.g. Daniel Robbins promising the world that Gentoo would have such a tree "soon" back in May '02.

Not implying anything - working through ideas and solving problems is what attracted me to this field, and reading through a good exploration of an idea is enjoyable too. I wanted to see a bit more of that.

I remember that interview and some of the ideas Daniel presented sound as interesting now as they did then ("promise" is too strong a term for optimistic statements about plans, IMHO). Since this thread is about the possibility of following a Robbins-lead variant of Gentoo rather than how to provide stable snapshots of portage, I'll point to the interview as evidence of why I'd at least entertain the concept. Not blindly, as many seem to be accusing people of, but just because Daniel shows many positive characteristics of leadership in his writings and public persona (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership#Suggested_qualities_of_leadership).

Based on anecdotal evidence, Daniel apparently possesses some "anti" leadership qualities too, so it's not clear whether he carries enough seeds of self-defeating behavior to counteract the positive ones. I suppose the reason so many people seem willing to entertain the idea is that there is little visible evidence of similar traits within Gentoo currently. Not that they aren't there, but without clear and visible communication, noone would know this. Given that a large part of the dissatisfaction with the project is due to lack of communication, it's hard to know. All other things being equal, better communicators are more likely to attract people to follow.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 5:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

c0d3g33k wrote:
steveL wrote:
What you're talking about sounds a lot like the frozen tree idea. It requires a fair amount of time to maintain backports to the tree. I guess you could do it with glsa-check maybe?

That's a pretty good idea, actually (versioning the tree). Though it does pose some logistical problems (upgrade to the next release or back into the moving tree), it's a reasonable way to get off the rolling release treadmill without going all the way to the nearly ubiquitous punctuated-release-only model. The approach seems to work well enough for many software projects that maintain a quasi-stable main branch under continuous development and peel off a stable snapshot when the time seems right. As pointed out in the thread, it's easy enough to use personal or community overlays to keep up to date with apps/packages one is interested in. Too bad the conversation went downhill so quickly ...

Yeah; leaving aside the bickering (heh) it might be nice basing it on the release snapshot as Gianelloni mentioned. It's not something that devs will have time for, and it's not really a development job, more an admin thing. I'd be happy to put time into something like that, but it would take quite a few people to ensure timely updates (more the merrier really; no-one can be on call 24/7.) As you say, people could easily overlay stuff if they wanted (it'd be fun to do a community overlay for it.) So I guess we'd be maintaining a tree, with a test system based on that tree, and then running glsa-check (and perhaps other stuff); we'd then need to import any updated ebuilds plus their dependencies. Tinderboxing could help with the QA before we pushed it out to distribution tree.

Ideally we'd really be watching advisory services ourselves as well. Keeping updates timely concerns me, since glsa's are not released until there's a fix in stable, and not every security flaw gets a glsa. Not quibbling with that process, just concerned about a lag between discovery and fix being available, especially if we're tinderboxing. (I suppose we could push stuff out if it's in stable while the tinderbox is running, but it doesn't sound so reliable.) But it is definitely doable by users- collectively we have a wealth of experience on computers and Gentoo admin. We could also get code and scripting support as needed from #friendly-coders.

A slightly lagging tree as opposed to a semi-frozen tree might be nicer, dunno. A semi-frozen one would effectively be the same as a binary distro (and maybe we could set up a binhost for that) whereas a delayed one would perhaps be a week or two behind Gentoo, but with everything tinderboxed, again with binpkgs available for those who want them. Stable only would be cool by me in that context. Just throwing out ideas :-)
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 6:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Where? Where is it? Where is this crisis I keep hearing about?
I don't know about the rest of you, but I don't see a crisis. My computer is up to date and has the latest software. And get this: it works perfectly!!! I've never used a better package manager than paludis. I've never seen a better and more up to date repository than the portage tree. I've never before been able to install scores of custom packages (ebuilds) from local repositories (or are they called overlays?) and not have dependency hell issues. As far as I know Gentoo is the only distro to have KDE4 in the main tree.

Also how is a DR fork going to be better than what we already have? Most of the software used on your machines is made by third parties. Gentoo is only a method of distributing that software (via ebuilds & portage/paludis/pkgcore). I myself am working on custom stage3 tarballs which will have all up to date packages based on ~x86 and use paludis as the default PM. I don't consider this a fork but a flavor of gentoo; a different install method.

For a gentoo fork to be considered a fork (IMHO) it must have something that is fundementally different from gentoo (i.e. a custom software repository, an improved PM, and improved package format, or something that gentoo doesn't already have). Why? Because if it is too similar to gentoo, than what is to stop the Gentoo project from absorbing the Gentoo devs from absorbing fixes or new developments from the fork and into Gentoo?

IMHO it is very difficult to fork gentoo and to make it better than gentoo already is (and keeping it that way).

However some things that I dislike about gentoo that I would like to see fixed:
1. A new website design (the current design reminds me of 2001. But I can live with it)
2. That's it. Everything else is just fine.

One issue people like DR seem to be bitching about is lack of transparency of what the devs are doing to gentoo.
Umm, have you ever heard of planet gentoo? <http://planet.gentoo.org/>
Gentoo universe? <http://planet.gentoo.org/universe/>
Subscribe to any mailinglists? <http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/lists.xml>
Visit any of the IRC channels? <http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/irc.xml>


But, you know what? Maybe I'm blind. Maybe I'm the only one who doesn't see this crisis, this cataclysm, this apochalyptic fate gentoo will soon meet. If this is indeed so, than maybe one of you helpful chaps can provide me with a precise definition of this crisis. And PLEASE don't say the foundation fell apart. Because as far as I am concerned the foundation has nothing to do with the technical dev side of gentoo (which, in the end, is all that really matters).

All the best.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 7:22 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Good comments. No time to respond at length right now, unfortunately. I'll throw in a few random comments since we're seriously off-topic before I rush out on my weekend errands.

steveL wrote:
*snip*
So I guess we'd be maintaining a tree, with a test system based on that tree, and then running glsa-check (and perhaps other stuff); we'd then need to import any updated ebuilds plus their dependencies. Tinderboxing could help with the QA before we pushed it out to distribution tree.

*snip*

Just throwing out ideas :-)

This kind of approach actually might be a good jumping off point for enabling focused Gentoo-derived variants rather than just grass-roots efforts, making the 'metadistribution' concept more than just marketing speak. (I prefer "proto" as a prefix as it captures the idea better, but I'll stick with the accepted term). Something along the lines of Sabayon might be less problematic if based on a periodic stable snapshot rather than an poorly supportable hodgepodge of stuff from the moving tree, an independent bleeding edge overlay and sometimes questionable hacks to make it all work. Ruthlessly reducing complexity seems to be the key to successfully implementing stable systems rather than adding more on top of it all. Of course that could be said of the frozen tree concept as well, but the benefit (in theory) is that the entire ecosystem doesn't have to be focused on a moving target. In theory.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 7:40 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

c0d3g33k wrote:
("promise" is too strong a term for optimistic statements about plans, IMHO).

You should be a government spin-doctor. :lol:

To save people having to open the link and find the appropriate excerpt, let me paste it here (bold added by me):

Daniel Robbins wrote:
OK, that being said -- are we going to address this issue soon? Yes. How? We're going to take pieces of the current "bleeding-edge" Gentoo Linux meta-distribution, refined them and use them as the basis for a robust, well-maintained version of Gentoo Linux -- geared exclusively for servers. For this project, we will reduce the number of ebuilds in our server branch from 1800 to around 400, at least initially. Our stable CVS tree will be completely separate from our current bleeding-edge version -- a "code firewall", if you will. Commit access will be limited to an elite team of Gentoo Linux developers. We will lock down upgrades so that "emerge --update world" will only fix known bugs and security fixes. Each release of this new server meta-distribution will have an official one-year lifespan, during which it will be painstakingly maintained by us. In-place upgrades to new releases will be fully-tested and very smooth. We will have some cross-pollination with our current tree, but anything that goes into the server distro will be carefully audited before being added. We are still developing the goals for our new server project, but based on feedback from the rest of our development team (who seem to be in near unanimous agreement) it looks like the project will progress very closely if not identically to how it is described above.

"Are we going to address this issue soon? Yes" sounds like an explicit promise to me. This is then followed up by a litany of what will be achieved (cue endless repetition of the word for rhetoric effect). The only part of that whole portion that contains even a hint of equivocation is "We are still developing the goals", but even that's quickly countermanded by the mention of "near unanimous agreement".

If one insists on interpreting it as an "optimistic statement about plans" (lol - again, what a wonderfully weasel-worded phrase ;-)), comparing his grandiose expectations to what actually got implemented (on this particular issue) leaves you with two possible conclusions:

a) He simply got it awesomely, colossally wrong. Well, it was the height of the hype bubble - perhaps he'd swallowed the kool-aid himself. Fair enough. We all make mistakes.
b) He was being deliberately misleading in the name of PR. This is morally reprehensible (at least IMHO) so I prefer to charitably assume a).
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 7:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I answered NO.

Not necessarily because I would not follow a BETTER Gentoo whatever it's name or wherever it came from or whoever leads,

but because I think Gentoo shouldn't be forked. I still believe that a united team is stronger than a divided one even though the better elements may be all in the latter.

I want change for sure. In fact, everyone around knows that change IS NEEDED for Gentoo to go on. But a fork could mean weakening Gentoo or it's forked counterpart. And that, I don't want it.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 9:34 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

muaddib,

What change do you want to see ?
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 10:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

***NO***

I have a half dozen production colo servers plane flights away running Gentoo. This problem must be solved from within, even if that means Robbins taking things over. If there is a fork where most Devs go, or if Gentoo becomes defunct, I will FOREVER feel betrayed by the community, and I will have to eat thousands of dollars in plane flights, man hours, and downtime flying on planes to datacenters to change servers to Debian. If this happens, I will never come back.
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PostPosted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 11:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Syntaxis wrote:
c0d3g33k wrote:
("promise" is too strong a term for optimistic statements about plans, IMHO).

You should be a government spin-doctor. :lol:

Thanks for arriving at the least charitable interpretation possible. There was no attempt at spin or weaseling, just an unwillingness to over-interpret as justification for character assassination. The word used to describe the statements made in the interview was "promise", and the suggestion was that promises were broken, implying that the speaker is a "promise breaker". Yet there was no *explicit* promise to be found in the statements I read (Explicit being something like "I promise" or "I vow"). That's what I meant by too strong. In the context of speaking as a representative of a group, "We will" is pretty firm and thus could be construed as representing an *implicit* promise. But it's common enough to speak resolutely about what one intends to accomplish rather than using the 'weasel words' you hate so much, particularly in interviews when plans of the future are being discussed. That's quite a bit different from addressing a specific audience directly regarding actions on a specific issue ("We will send your paychecks out on the 30th so you can pay the rent"). If making a distinction based on context is weaseling, I guess I'm guilty as charged.
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 10:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

hell no.
doing that is means what you/we/i are running away from our possible problems.
after watching the `releng` meeting, i am very cofident that gentoo is *very* alive =)

for those that say that they will follow the fork, what they will do when possible problems
arise? drop it and come back to gentoo or another fork? :S

that is my personal opinion and belief, i maybe be wrong.
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 27, 2008 6:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

c0d3g33k wrote:
Syntaxis wrote:
c0d3g33k wrote:
("promise" is too strong a term for optimistic statements about plans, IMHO).

You should be a government spin-doctor. :lol:

Thanks for arriving at the least charitable interpretation possible. There was no attempt at spin or weaseling, just an unwillingness to over-interpret as justification for character assassination. The word used to describe the statements made in the interview was "promise", and the suggestion was that promises were broken, implying that the speaker is a "promise breaker". Yet there was no *explicit* promise to be found in the statements I read (Explicit being something like "I promise" or "I vow"). That's what I meant by too strong. In the context of speaking as a representative of a group, "We will" is pretty firm and thus could be construed as representing an *implicit* promise. But it's common enough to speak resolutely about what one intends to accomplish rather than using the 'weasel words' you hate so much, particularly in interviews when plans of the future are being discussed. That's quite a bit different from addressing a specific audience directly regarding actions on a specific issue ("We will send your paychecks out on the 30th so you can pay the rent"). If making a distinction based on context is weaseling, I guess I'm guilty as charged.

Nah, he should be an effin' lawyer ;p Oh wait, most politicians are lawyers..

Chill out, c0d3g33k, he was joking! :-)

* igli heads down't'pub
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