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miroR
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 3:20 am    Post subject: Re: KDE for surveillance-aware people Reply with quote

Per request, split this post from KMail to mutt with Maildir and procmail as it was really the start of a new topic. — JRG

steveL wrote:
miroR wrote:
Just to tell you that the link above is dead. (Unless it's only for me, but I don't think so.)
You know what to search to find what happened to it, such as if it got renamed, it'd be great if you find it and correct the link (or fix it otherwise).

Yeah they seem to have reorganised the wiki, and it's gone now; thanks, linked just to the wiki instead.
Quote:
I'm only saying it because I also care for other users. (I used kmail long ago with kde, but how could I use kde when they got dbus which i hate and probably other, just like gnome... OTOH, I'll just write a short tip on mutt how I use it, and why, next.)

KDE is actually a lot saner than you might think; the next release, KF (KDE Frameworks) will be in fact be much more modular than currently. They're breaking it into more loosely-coupled components, because it makes their lives easier. The Unix approach always wins out in the end, since it's just a distillation of what works. Modularity is the CS term for it; low coupling and high cohesion, which boils down to "Do one thing, and do it well."

4.x is fine so long as you run without semantic-craptop; it's a shame we had to lose KMail, but I really am glad I'm on mutt now. It's so lightweight, multiple instances are fine and there's no problem shutting down without closing them all. Combined with yakuake it works much better, principally because everything is so quick: practically instantaneous.

I agree dbus is a busted idea, fwtw. Getting rid of nubkit is the first step though, ime, to a leaner, cleaner machine.

I'm looking forward to playing with KF; I've been building kate from git for a couple of years, though not so much recently. Given that they're specifically moving toward more modularity, and that we build everything from source, I think there's scope for some good work.

I predict a Gentoo revival. :-)

We just have to be careful we don't lose the principled approach currently in place in critical infrastructure projects. It's easy to do when you get a large influx of new people; and commercial bindists have every reason to hobble our OOTB capability, so personally I'd be very wary of "former" developers from other distros.

As it's that approach which leads to Gentoo being capable of so much.

I like to read your posts. It would be great if you managed not to be touchy as you show to be sometimes, and to ponder over before blaming people (and I don't mean me)... But it's a minor fault.

It'd be huge work for me to try KDE out. It's beyond what I can do at this time. Too stretched. But I take your word on the sanity of KDE.

Just, can it be installed without dbus? I don't think so...

I did give KDE a try, some two weeks ago, on a cloned Gentoo machine (same MBOs, a few boxes in my SOHO, perfectly clonable from one onto another, dd dumping and dd restoring...), and tried to get Kaffeine.

Nope! It was dbus back in there. And it just wouldn't install without replacing my gnupg-1, which I want (
Install Mutt without Portage, and Why, for Air-Gappers
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1002146.html
) with gnupg-2 which introduces GUI and other overhead...

I hope people like you fix KDE for us surveillance-aware people. I remember KDE was kind of pride of SuSE back when it was a really fine and reliable thing of the best German Linux people...

I like English people too, you're English I think. Nigel Farage supported us in Croatia, By us, I mean honest and home-loving Croats, not the neocommunist regime that ruins Croatia...
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steveL
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 2:23 pm    Post subject: Re: KDE for surveillance-aware people Reply with quote

miroR wrote:
I'm only saying it because I also care for other users. (I used kmail long ago with kde, but how could I use kde when they got dbus which i hate and probably other, just like gnome... OTOH, I'll just write a short tip on mutt how I use it, and why, next.)

steveL wrote:
KDE is actually a lot saner than you might think; the next release, KF (KDE Frameworks) will be in fact be much more modular than currently. They're breaking it into more loosely-coupled components, because it makes their lives easier. The Unix approach always wins out in the end, since it's just a distillation of what works. Modularity is the CS term for it; low coupling and high cohesion, which boils down to "Do one thing, and do it well."

4.x is fine so long as you run without semantic-craptop; it's a shame we had to lose KMail, but I really am glad I'm on mutt now. It's so lightweight, multiple instances are fine and there's no problem shutting down without closing them all. Combined with yakuake it works much better, principally because everything is so quick: practically instantaneous.

I agree dbus is a busted idea, fwtw. Getting rid of nubkit is the first step though, ime, to a leaner, cleaner machine.

I'm looking forward to playing with KF; I've been building kate from git for a couple of years, though not so much recently. Given that they're specifically moving toward more modularity, and that we build everything from source, I think there's scope for some good work.

I predict a Gentoo revival. :-)

We just have to be careful we don't lose the principled approach currently in place in critical infrastructure projects. It's easy to do when you get a large influx of new people; and commercial bindists have every reason to hobble our OOTB capability, so personally I'd be very wary of "former" developers from other distros.

As it's that approach which leads to Gentoo being capable of so much.

miroR wrote:
I like to read your posts. It would be great if you managed not to be touchy as you show to be sometimes, and to ponder over before blaming people (and I don't mean me)... But it's a minor fault.

Yeah, I'm not a politician, nor even a people-person really.

Though there's nothing wrong with criticising ideas, speech or output, afaic; that's an old debate, much older than Computing, and it was settled a long time ago. Geeks just need to wake up to that fact, and stop believing everything they do or say is somehow new, just because they are.

That tendency tends to align itself with ignoring history, and that as most of the rotw knows, just dooms you to repeating it.

"The names and the faces have changed [and nowadays the website;], but the game is still the same."

Either way, I spend the majority of my time correcting my own mistakes. As such I'd go mad if I were precious about my output.

The same applies to everyone else afaic: if you start to believe your own hype, you'll go mad. Far better not to indulge in hype in the first place, and let your work speak for itself (or not.) In no event should you attach your ego to either your code, or your words. That only leads to inflexibility, and an inability to both adapt, as well as learn from your own mistakes.

Note that doesn't mean you can be nasty to people, or being mean is somehow acceptable. Just that in the main, in public forums you're allowed to criticise ideas, speech and output. If you're stuck as to how to do this, avoid saying anything about the person, and speak solely about the ideas presented.

In the rare cases where the person is relevant, such as when there is a repeated pattern of behaviour, or illogical bulshytt masquerading as esoteric "knowledge", again speak about the ideas they've presented, or their actions in relation to the work, over a period of time. When all is said and done, you have no idea who the other person is, since you only have their words and ideas, and no physical interaction.

That realisation in itself, is immensely liberating. It's not about what you look like, nor anything else apart from the ideas and the results.
And indeed the collaboration.
Quote:
It'd be huge work for me to try KDE out. It's beyond what I can do at this time. Too stretched. But I take your word on the sanity of KDE.

Just, can it be installed without dbus? I don't think so...

I did give KDE a try, some two weeks ago, on a cloned Gentoo machine (same MBOs, a few boxes in my SOHO, perfectly clonable from one onto another, dd dumping and dd restoring...), and tried to get Kaffeine.

Nope! It was dbus back in there. And it just wouldn't install without replacing my gnupg-1, which I want, with gnupg-2 which introduces GUI and other overhead...(

Yeah KDE requires dbus. I didn't have a problem with dbus when it came out, but over time I've realised it's a nutty idea. You're still tied to an ABI when you use it, irrespective of whether the underlying protocol can handle it, so all it does is act as an inappropriate bottleneck.

Strategically, it allows RedHat to sell its customers an opt-out from the GPL, while still effectively linking to GPL codebases. That hasn't been tested in Court of course, and I for one wouldn't believe any lawyer nor snake-oil salesman that it would stand up to inspection.

If anything, I'd fire the lawyer who dreamt it up or okayed it, as he's a liability.

Localising RPC doesn't stop it being a function-call; that's the whole point of RPC. All they're doing is exactly that, and labelling it IPC.

Indeed when I ran the above analysis of the motivation, past an embedded developer, his immediate response was "Yeah, that's exactly why we [his company] love dbus: because we can ignore the GPL."

That conversation also confirmed to me that another practitioner doesn't see any difference between calling a function via an API, and via an API wrapping an RPC call; from the code perspective it's exactly the same. Again, that's the whole point of RPC, so it would be very strange for anyone to argue otherwise.

Nor are any of those embedded companies anything other than practitioners, since they employ software developers to do this work.

So if I were them, I'd seriously start pulling myself out of that game, as they know full well they're breaking the law. There is no excuse of ignorance even feasible.

Technically speaking it's a terrible idea to think you can multiplex better than the kernel, when that is most of what the kernel does.

It is thus a liability in terms of efficiency, robustness and overall performance.

IPC should be left to the kernel to manage, since it has so many implications. By all means provide domain-specific convenience abstractions, where domain is data-related (ie user context); rather than desktop vs anything else.

Just don't be a muppet and buy into the emperor's "new clothes for old rope".
Quote:
I hope people like you fix KDE for us surveillance-aware people. I remember KDE was kind of pride of SuSE back when it was a really fine and reliable thing of the best German Linux people...

Eh it won't be me, nor even Gentoo people, though we might help; KF is like I said more modular because that makes the most sense in terms of maintenance.

That means being able to swap parts in and out, and not build them at all, although that's obviously not something an individual is going to do strictly alone. Even if you do build your own mix, you'll be building it using other people's work, and howtos that give you a start. But it is perfectly feasible nonetheless, and even more so in the context of a distro, and especially so for a from-source distro or a BSD.

So if anything, the rest of the world is going in the opposite direction to the systemdiots.
Quote:
I like English people too, you're English I think. Nigel Farage supported us in Croatia, By us, I mean honest and home-loving Croats, not the neocommunist regime that ruins Croatia...

Hehe; well I have a feeling Farage will turn out to be the next century's Hitler. Everyone thought he was a harmless nutcase too.. ;)
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miroR
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 25, 2014 4:50 pm    Post subject: Re: KDE for surveillance-aware people Reply with quote

steveL wrote:

miroR wrote:
...It would be great if you managed not to be touchy...

...
Yeah, I'm not a politician, nor even a people-person really.
...

If I were you in the thread where you use too strong words against, say, mv, or the German guy who you accused of trolling, and which provoked a very civilized but time consuming justification on his part where his innocence shines.... steveL, I would just simply say, sorry, and that would make for soo much... ;-)
I like mv also... I'd love to be using his squashmount... but after much more learning still to do... (don't go there if you expect to see clean deployment of the problem there, my level is still low, may even remain so)...

But I was thinking, and I prefer to put it publicly, pls. try and understand that it is the shortest and the best way:

After I read your take on the weaker license by Lucas Nussbaum --there I put it for Debian folks to read it, because it made me understand deeper, and because, apart from one detail, they should find it helpfut to solving of the issue, I was thinking to try and kindly ask you to do just this in your original post:
s/debilian/debian' or some other polite, and not disparaging expression, so then I could change it in the quote on Debian Forums. Please!
steveL wrote:

Quote:
It'd be huge work for me to try KDE out.
...[snip]...
Just, can it be installed without dbus? I don't think so...
...[snip]...
Nope! It was dbus back in there. And it just wouldn't install without replacing my gnupg-1, which I want, with gnupg-2 which introduces GUI and other overhead...(

Yeah KDE requires dbus. I didn't have a problem with dbus when it came out, but over time I've realised it's a nutty idea.
...[snip]...
Strategically, it allows RedHat to sell its customers an opt-out from the GPL, while still effectively linking to GPL codebases. That hasn't been tested in Court of course, and I for one wouldn't believe any lawyer nor snake-oil salesman that it would stand up to inspection.

If anything, I'd fire the lawyer who dreamt it up or okayed it, as he's a liability.

Localising RPC doesn't stop it being a function-call; that's the whole point of RPC. All they're doing is exactly that, and labelling it IPC.
...[snip]...
Quote:
I hope people like you fix KDE for us surveillance-aware people. I remember KDE was kind of pride of SuSE back when it was a really fine and reliable thing of the best German Linux people...

Eh it won't be me, nor even Gentoo people, though we might help; KF is like I said more modular because that makes the most sense in terms of maintenance.
...[snip]...
So if anything, the rest of the world is going in the opposite direction to the systemdiots.

Just learned a few things from you here. Thanks! (Just as with Spender, the Grsecurity's author, see my signiture; saying that for other readers of this topic, I decide whom I trust, and in what, based on not only technical meritum, which I can not always judge --not a programmer, or just a fraction of one--, but other --and still logical-- reasons. Great points you made here.
steveL wrote:

Quote:
I like English people too, you're English I think. Nigel Farage supported us in Croatia
...[snip]...

...[snip]...
next century's Hitler. Everyone thought he was a harmless nutcase too.. ;)

Far from! Nigel is some of the best, patriotic and kind, and sensible Englishmen you can hear from in the media! He is demonized for all the wrong reasons, but I suggest we agree to disagree on this, so not to draw away the focus from the other points, esp. the great dbus points you made, as well as your points on KDE.
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steveL
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 9:34 am    Post subject: Re: KDE for surveillance-aware people Reply with quote

miroR wrote:
If I were you in the thread where you use too strong words against, say, mv, or the German guy who you accused of trolling, and which provoked a very civilized but time consuming justification on his part where his innocence shines.... steveL, I would just simply say, sorry, and that would make for soo much... ;-)

Eh? I often do just apologise to get the conversation past any difficulty caused by brusqueness. Wrt mv, I apologised to him unequivocally here (which is a post specifically about communication issues we've had.) However he's pretty brusque himself, as he's a German (or German-speaking) and the language/approach tends to come across as brusque if you're not used to it (speaking German helps.) Plus his own personality, ofc, which is quite geekish like most of us, from what I've seen.

As for "accusing" people of trolling, quite often I do that not because I truly believe someone is trolling (though that does happen, ofc) but to indicate to someone new that they're coming across wrong, and might want to rethink what they're saying, or how they're saying it. If the latter is the case as you say they come across as completely innocent after, but in the meantime they've become a bit more accustomed to the vibe of the community they're joining. Typically they're not new to the internet, and quite often it's a source of humour, ime. (just another misunderstanding that comes with the territory, and we move past it.)

Friction is inevitable when people are bumping up against each other, which is why we have social mechanisms, like humour, to get us past awkward moments.

Plain speaking helps too, but that runs into cultural issues since Anglophones are very repressed, in general. IME they tend either not to talk about anything (and pretend that is the same thing as machismo), or blow up when the repression cannot withstand scrutiny, or more commonly when they can't self-repress any more.

OFC I have my "bad-hair days" just like anyone else, so by all means point it out if you think I'm out of line. Chances are I didn't mean whatever interpretation was alluded to me, or I was just having a bad day, in which case I'll apologise when I'm more rested ;)
Quote:
After I read your take on the weaker license by Lucas Nussbaum --there I put it for Debian folks to read it, because it made me understand deeper, and because, apart from one detail, they should find it helpfut to solving of the issue, I was thinking to try and kindly ask you to do just this in your original post:
s/debilian/debian' or some other polite, and not disparaging expression, so then I could change it in the quote on Debian Forums.

You've already quoted it, and it would be a bit dishonest of me to go back and pretend I never said what I did, I feel.

Quite honestly, the rest of the content is more likely to get their backs up than the use of the word "debilian", though I accept that the latter could just confirm whatever prejudice they wanted to justify to themselves in ignoring the substantive points.

However, I don't think you're doing the argument any favours with long, rambling posts. The problem is that it tends to put off replies, since people are faced with a wall of text, which is a lot to even read, let alone respond to, especially if we want to respond properly to points in context. And there's always the worry that a simple response is going to get another wall of text in reply.
Quote:
Just learned a few things from you here. Thanks! (Just as with Spender, the Grsecurity's author, see my signiture; saying that for other readers of this topic

Cool :) Thanks for the link, the grsecurity page was very interesting (bookmarked.)
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 29, 2014 6:19 pm    Post subject: Re: KDE for surveillance-aware people Reply with quote

steveL wrote:
...[snip]...
Eh? I often do just apologise to
...[snip]...

I'm pretty happy with your reply!

I hope maybe some users can get KDE in good ways (like with the links that you gave)...

Because I am so happy to live free from dbus and systemd and *kits, pulseaudio and other poetteringware, that I can't imagine going for KDE simply because some of those poetteringware is unavoidable in KDE.

That family of programs I really really want to live without.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2014 6:38 pm    Post subject: Re: KDE for surveillance-aware people Reply with quote

miroR wrote:
systemd and *kits, pulseaudio and other poetteringware

In fact pootteringware are not always bad -- because ifplugd is not :wink:
(It may be not excellent, but is at least "not bad" in the "mediocre" sense :P)
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 31, 2014 8:16 pm    Post subject: Re: KDE for surveillance-aware people Reply with quote

CasperVector wrote:
miroR wrote:
systemd and *kits, pulseaudio and other poetteringware

In fact pootteringware are not always bad -- because ifplugd is not :wink:
(It may be not excellent, but is at least "not bad" in the "mediocre" sense :P)

If you're careless for surveillance on you, and want to remain so, I agree with you for you, because what can I do? You can give all the keys to your own life, and not just your, say appartment, and your, really, your computer to unknown remote seats, it you want so, I can not object, and will not object. Besides, if you go and read the link below, you'll see that even Linus Torvalds is happy that you don't care about surveillance on you (my free interpretation of his stance on security published iin the video pointed to and analyzed in the link below).

OTOH, if you are, in fact, uninformed (I can't tell whether you are this latter or the former), read a post of mine, with lots to quotes and carefully included links to cleverer people's than me writings and to videos, along with my strong interpretation, the post that was not removed, regardless of having been reported and some pressure having been exerted that it be removed:

Why is Gentoo not switching to systemd?
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-998108-start-300.html#7624044

Again, you are fine taking this or that side, as far as I go. Cheers!
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 01, 2014 7:27 am    Post subject: Re: KDE for surveillance-aware people Reply with quote

miroR wrote:
Again, you are fine taking this or that side, as far as I go. Cheers!

Do not get me wrong. I am a systemd/pulseaudio/avahi hater (when I say "hate", I literally mean something stronger than "dislike"), and hate Poettering in almost every aspect :)
Nevertheless, I do mean that some of Poettering's really small (and non-ambitious) projects might still deserver a look, though with a little sarcasm (which unfortunately did not seem obvious) :wink:
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 01, 2014 1:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

CasperVector wrote:
some of Poettering's really small (and non-ambitious) projects might still deserve a look

If a piece of software is useful to you, then use it; sure.

In this case though, I think you'd likely be better off with dhcpcd.
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 01, 2014 2:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

steveL wrote:
In this case though, I think you'd likely be better off with dhcpcd.

Thanks, but I personally think ifplugd is, in the pragmatic sense, more suitable for me for the following technical reasons:

  • ifplugd provides explicit interfaces for network hotplug events, which can be used in my own settings.
  • ifplugd seems technically slightly better than netplug.
  • My current long-working configuration framework would require massive refactoring to achieve the ifplugd-free goal, and will likely lack features.
    (Similar reason also contribute to many people's reluctance against so-called "upgrade" to systemd.)

And plus the following non-technical reasons:

  • ifplugd (and netplug) are recommended way to deal with network hotplug in the Gentoo Handbook, even back in 2011 when I migrated from Ubuntu to Gentoo.
  • ifplugd was last updated in 2005 (but still works), so it was perhaps not involved Lennart's <sarcasm>grand plan</sarcasm>.
  • In case it really becomes part of the scheme, its relatively small codebase will make a fork quite easy.

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PostPosted: Sat Nov 01, 2014 8:37 pm    Post subject: Re: KDE for surveillance-aware people Reply with quote

CasperVector wrote:
miroR wrote:
Again, you are fine taking this or that side, as far as I go. Cheers!

Do not get me wrong. I am a systemd/pulseaudio/avahi hater (when I say "hate", I literally mean something stronger than "dislike"), and hate Poettering in almost every aspect :)
Nevertheless, I do mean that some of Poettering's really small (and non-ambitious) projects might still deserver a look, though with a little sarcasm (which unfortunately did not seem obvious) :wink:

It's OK. Though not for me :) . I try and keep the big picture in mind with all of it, and we are in the Big Brother's age...

BTW, I love simple command like programs like dhcpcd. dhclient is fine (default in my setup of Debian), but less then the lean and mean dhcpcd in my Gentoo.
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