From US Rep. Rick Santorum:
"It all comes from, I would argue, this right to privacy that doesn't exist, in my opinion, in the United States Constitution."
It was part of his anti-sodomy tirade, but who cares. There it is, folks: the right out persons to be free in their own homes just doesn't exist. It was your fantasy. Too damn bad.
If you care, see
the story, but it hardly matters.
For those who came in late, Keith Packard (KP), who has done a great deal of work on the XFree86 software that so many Open Source OSes depend upon, recently lost his commit access. He's completely unhappy with the way XFree86 is run, and has been for some time. In the last few weeks he's taken to asking -- with the support of others involved in developing for XFree86 -- if the current XFree86 organization will be making any changes towards more transparency -- and if so, when.
Well, now he has his answer, and I'm certainly sure that it puts his mind to rest just as well as it does mine! [note: in this transcript, EE is Egbert Eich]
From the
teleconference minutes:
KP: What should we talk about this week?
??: Has there been any response from XFree86?
EE: The board plans to publish a mission statement. Nothing has been
made public yet, so I cannot comment.
I just don't know what to say except: "Folks, you just can't make this sh*t up."
Although we run RedHat on the server here, I use FreeBSD at home because I like tinkering with the source (FreeBSD provides anonymous CVS access to their entire source tree).
One cool thing that they also have, that not many people know about, is a cluster of build machines (the "bento cluster") that spend all day checking out and building all the third-party applications (they call them "ports"). Build failures are summarized to HTML pages.
My current work screen-scrapes these pages and correlates the data in ways that are more human-friendly. In addition, I pick up the
ports Problem Reports (PRs) and comingle that data. The latest round of changes adds in data from the CVS logs themselves. The aim is to provide one-stop shopping for checking out the state of all applications that build from source (the majority of them). So who needs to be grovelling around looking for RPMs? :-)
See
http://lonesome.dyndns.org:XYZ/bento/errorlogs/newindex.html on my home machine for more, including the abstract of a paper I had submitted to BSDCon 2003 (they passed on it). Note: substitute 4802 for XYZ in the URL (yes, 4802 not 4801; I moved the server to a different machine again). (The reason it doesn't run on :80 is because of the spam-address-harvesters. Hate them.)
Right now some of the reports take too much time to generate, so I'm moving to a database-based model (good thing I have 5 years of experience working on those, eh?) So far, the PR summary pages have gone from 15 minutes to 6 seconds. More work is on the way.