Older blog entries for gwm (starting at number 18)

Today I sympathize with KDE. In the past, I have been very hostile to it, but the imense quantity of high quality translations to a a impressive number of languages has enchanted me. Human languages are very interesting and important cultural marks to be ignored in favor of some "English is enough" philosophy. My comments are based purely on my perception, and may be very unfair, but Gnome doesn't get anywhere near KDE with regard to cultural respect. This is probably because Gnome is mostly based in the US, and KDE mostly in Europe, and Americans have this awfully stupid idea that "Everyone knows English".

Brazil is even worse when it comes to languages - the US at least has millions of immigrants who take their cultures with them, but Brazil is a Portuguese-only country. There are no major groups speaking any other language. The Brazilian computer culture has widely adopted English, though, (even if not everyone's ability with English is great, as you can see in this diary entry) and demonstrated very little respect for Portuguese while at it. Years of 8-bit unclean code and incompatible character sets have given place to a horrible byproduct of written Portuguese, with all accents ignored or at least changed to a informal two-character encoding set. The relative verbosity of Portuguese (English is so compact) caused people to invent a number of ugly abbreviations.This entire scenario means many Brazilians, even in their blissfully monolingual country actually prefer English to Portuguese on their computer screens. Low quality localized software plays a great role in this - I have been advised to stick with the English version of MacOS on my Macintosh, for example. Gnome is also a great example of this - yes, Gnome comes with gettext support, but this is only a small part of the game. A gmc window, for example, has buttons with descriptions, and the lenght of these descriptions defines the minimal width of a window. With gmc properly translated to Portuguese the windows won't fit into 640x480, and will take considerable screen space on 800x600. This isn't exactly attractive, and if the translators didn't invent some alternative though not very proper terms, this could be a very good reason for not using Portuguese at all.

This decayed descendent of English and Portuguese that's used in Brazil is actually one major obstacle to popular adoption of computing. Nobody wants to learn a new language (and another culture) before sitting in front of computer, and a technical conversation is probably not even possible without using a number of English words. And even people who can at least read English shouldn't want to see a non-native language on their screens, nor settle with low-quality localized software. KDE is a great environment, and it is culturaly respectful at least to the cultures I care about. Maybe Gnome will be successful in the US, but everywhere else it can't match KDE.

But then, I'm only whining, I may be completely wrong and unfair to the hard work of a number of people, I don't follow nor contribute to either project, and my text is extremely confusing - I intended only to talk about how cool KDE's translations are when I started.

Just a quick note to avi: rpm need not change name. I believe that, officially, RPM now stands for "RPM Package Manager". If people keep calling it "Red Hat Package Manager", it's because they want to. Of course, Red Hat seems to still call it Red Hat Package Manager, but so do I, at times. Furthermore, rpm is not Linux-specific, so the lpm name would not be a good idea. And I don't see what makes sourceforge.net more neutral than rpm.org.

One more thing about the Freshmeat editorial claudio wrote: several people (including people I never heard of) have asked me if the opinions in the article are Conectiva's (with one n:)) official position. Well, no. But the discussion it raises will hopefully be useful. I like to see people got tired of discussing irrelevant things like package managers endlessly, it shows the community is a little more mature. Package managing is a extremely boring thing, and the less people care about it, the better (I think). Kudos to claudio for the editorial.

Fenasoft

Fenasoft (largest computer fair in Brazil) sucked. It's was a huge time waster. Many "web portals" and software stores all alike. I may be biased, but Conectiva's stand was the only one worth visiting. The problem is, the general public did not have enough knowledge to appreciate it. People may now know what Linux is, but it's still something they only have heard about.

Interactive Fiction

Spent the rest of the day taking the dust out of xzip. First, I tried the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, which I had played before I knew it was also a book. This is one nasty unforgiving game. After getting killed 57 times or so, I quit. Then, I tried a IF called Photopia. If you are a IF fan, I can't recommend it enough. It is a sweet little story mixing ordinary people's lifes and fantasy. I recommend that you use frotz instead of xzip because the game makes heavy use of color - and it's a wonderful use of color too, very uncommon in the IF world. The game is available at the GMD IF archive.

Advogato

Advogato was down yesterday night, it seems. This diary entry is yesterday's.

Spent a considerable part of my day trying out the PLD. It's a very nice distribution. My problem was with installation - it was entirely in Polish, and I could not find a English boot disk anywhere else (maybe there's one and I was stupid for not looking hard enough). So I got one of the test machines and intended to install it live. Well, for various reasons, installation from the development machine wasn't working. Someone had installed Mandrake on the test machine, so I had to use it. After a few hours of rpm magic (the magic of -- force and --nodeps, that is), the system was installed, though slightly broken because of the previous Mandrake installation.

I didn't have a lot of time to play with the system, but I did notice a few strong points. First, it's a very up-to- date system. I downloaded a ISO image and it came with XFree86 4.0 and things like that. Second, the init scripts seemed to be much cleaner than the traditional Red Hat scripts (and it seems to be compatible, too). They even use "new" stuff like iproute instead of the standard netkit tools. And third and most impressive, the packaging was done very correctly. They use a lot of macro magic to make the spec files cleaner and more mantainable (things like using %configure, using macros for directory locations, tagging the language of potfiles and documentation, etc). Very cool. They also promise things like IPv6 support.

And all this from a definetely non-mainstream distribution.

Spent all day practicing my favorite sport: breaking the distro. ncurses5 is in, termcap is finally out, bash has been updated to bash 2.04 at last, man, info and doc directories now follow the FHS. Going the FHS-way is already breaking old packages, and I haven't even scratched the surface of full FHS compliancy.

Working with a Linux distribution is a fun thing; everybody loves giving opinions and complaining about the things you do (or don't), but very few people have the necessary insight to truly understand all of the issues involved. Every day I read imense threads that end up in my mail box that completely miss the point about future directions of development. Some hints:

• Linux is a Unix-like system. You cannot ignore 30 years of development trying to change major parts of it overnight (example: the security system). Concepts from single-user operating systems like MacOS or Windows are almost always unsuitable for Linux.
• Most of the obvious ideas have already been tried and failed.
• Compatibility matters. Once in a while it has to be broken in favor of progress, but do not assume that millions of users out there will happily support progress.
• Theoretical ideas and nothing are twins. If your idea has not been implemented before, you are missing many practical issues that were not predicted.
• You had an idea, you implement it. Do not expect other (busy) developers will try to implement your (probably clueless) idea just because you had it.

I'm back from my first trip to Rio. Nice city (the touristic area that I was in, of course), not so nice people (taxi drivers in particular must die). Been to some expensive restaurants (obviously I didn't pay), attended Cauby Peixoto's ("Conceiçããão..." - he rules) show at a square reinauguration in Copacabana, and been to all of the standard touristic places.

If you ask me what I think was the biggest negative contribution to the free software world, I won't even blink before answering: Open Source. I'm sorry, but I'd rather be in a community that does cool stuff and shares it than be in a community where participants are companies looking for loopholes in the community's conventions in order to make a profit. ncm has written this article that shows the kind of thing I'm talking about. Open Source turned cheating into an acceptable practice.

As far as I am concearned, however, intention does count. There are varying levels of commitment, and imposing the kind of restriction mentioned in the article denotes the lowest.

Conectiva Linux 5.1 is out - almost. Minor issues are still holding it back. This is a release I hope I'll never have to touch again, since I've played too much with it already. It's old stuff by now.

The next Conectiva Linux will be a point-zero release, which means we'll be breaking everything again. Just kidding, but there are features no other major current Linux distribution supports in our plans. I hope all of them will be adopted, but, unfortunately, we work with limited resources (like: limited time as opposed to infinity).

If you have an idea you'd like to see implemented, however, don't be shy and tell us about it - it may be implemented, who knows.

And by the way, it's Conectiva, not Connectiva.

In the dealing-with-the-real-world arena, things may improve soon. And furthermore, there may be some significant new stuff to do at Conectiva. We may have a great time in the future. Right now, it is very important that Conectiva doesn't become a souless company because it's becoming more 'professional'[1]. Professionalism is a sin, punished with death. Conectiva didn't get a hell of a oportunity with a VC because of 'professionalism', so there's no point in changing its attitude now. I've been reading a lot of diaries here, and Conectiva's story is not new: bright new company with a great culture gets funding and becomes valuable. Then top-down incompetence comes in and destroys environment, preparing for a premature brave new world of 'professionalism', employees run away scared, company dies or becomes irrelevant. This kind of thing has happened many times, and it will happen again.

Finally, in the outdoors arena, hanging 60+ meters high tied to a rope is a lot of fun.

[1] 'professional': cap. sin. 1. Idiotic, pseudo-efficient, dumb, silly, cretin. 2. Shooting itself on the foot. Opposite: efficient, smart, intelligent.

I hate security freaks.

Warning: non-technical stuff, certainly unsuitable for Advogato, in this diary entry. Do yourself a favor and skip it.