Slackware a son dernier souffle

Des déformateurs viendront probablement une fois encore tenter d'obnubiler le
sujet de ce fil en me couvrant d'invectives pour ne pas avoir posté en
français. Je rappelle donc que j'ai écrit ce message concernant Slackware pour
le groupe alt.os.linux.slackware, là où le plus de gens s'intéressent à Slackware.

Mais je pense que les francophones pourraient aussi être intéressés par cette
question. Comme il n'existe pas de groupe slackware français, les puristes de
la langue pourront donc amener leur contribution en traduisant, si tant est
qu'ils pensent que mon message en vaut la peine. Dans le cas contraire, ils
n'auront qu'à passer outre.

J'invite les lecteurs à noter qui, sous de faux prétextes, vient
systématiquement saboter ce groupe.

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Well, we know Patrick has been sick. There has been entries for only 5 days,
only in the current changelog, since he /recovered/ on December 18th. Hey, is
there any way we can order him to get better? But it would certainly be good
news if we learned somebody is teaming with him. Unfortunately, this sounds
like pure utopia.

Instead, we have all sorts of people here who pretend to be "in contact" but
who's names are nowhere to be found on Slackware's site. Try the following
search at Google's:

site:www.slackware.com Keller OR Hicks OR Lizella OR "wombat.san-francisco.ca.us"

This has been an ongoing story for years. The result of having to rely on this
newsgroup to get information is that all too often people are told to RTFM and
are sometimes given plain disinformation.

So that when Mr Hicks writes: "Stay tuned. We should have a public
anonymous ftp server setup come late Saturday evening."(1) that's the one
place I wouldn't take my upgrades from. When changes are approved, they should
be on all mirrors. Final. Hicks' friggin' bullshit is a joke.

(1)
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_umsgid=10uspku3mfgbafb%40corp.supernews.com&lr=&hl=fr

For years, I've explained you can't run a distro this way, leaving the newbies
taking uneducated guesses at who's real and who's fake. Now that the so-called
Man is all but dead, that the upgrades are not being made, the lack of
structure is more evident.

For what it means, we see that Slackware is dwindling at Distrowatch:

For the last month:

1 Mandrakelinux 1375
2 MEPIS 1366
3 SUSE 1243
4 Ubuntu 1125
5 Fedora 1096
6 Debian 993
7 KNOPPIX 796
8 Gentoo 674
9 Damn Small 573
10 Slackware 560

The likes of Mepis, Ubuntu and even Damn Small Linux have now gotten ahead.

It's getting late. If a minimal structure is not put in place right now,
Slackware will disappear. Luc Cottyn, who's contribution to Slackware has
never been recognized because of a feud where we now see he had every reason
to be mad(1), has "disappered" and nobody raised a finger. After all, we
"still had the code", didn't we? But not much development happened after he left.

(1) By this, I mean that one year after Cottyn stopped developping Swaret, no
update tool has yet replaced it. So he was right to pretend that all the noise
made around slapt-get and such was pure bullshit... at best.

Some people have said that problems with upgrade tools can be deadly but so
can problems in a firewall, a firewall interface, administrative tools such as
those included in KDE or Webmin. And I don't remember that a single security
problem has been noted in swaret, which is a real feat!

The code is open, and the script can be compared from one version to the next
with diff. So, given that, countrary to Mr Hicks' pretentions, an upgrade tool
is nowadays absolutely necessary for a distro to stay afloat, where's the problem?

To me, the lot of Luc Cottyn is truly indicative of how easily manipulation
can operate in subverting the building of a community. This has to change now,
otherwise hoping for users to support Slackware is vain.

In one of his message while he was sick, Patrick said he'd change his modus
operandi soon as he'd get better. Maybe he's not so much better, but the need
for restructuration is more patent now than ever and, despise promises, we
don't see much happening in the changelogs.

It's now the final countdown on a most interesting project, the only one
that's really true to the Linux spirit.

GP