None of the Above (was Re: Sendmail still default?)

[Matthew Garrett]

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 06:33:51PM -0400, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 06:13:56PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > Also, we should stop doing any kernel development until ipw4965 actually 
> > works. I'm pretty sure we don't need another slab allocator.
> 
> And how many years as gnome out of disk been broken, or evolution crap ?

To be fair to evolution, it's getting on for being in the region of half 
as big as the kernel. Making it non-crap isn't a five minute job, and 
asking people to spend three years failing to get very far through it 
isn't likely to win many friends. We have insane quantities of crap code 
in the distribution and stopping feature development in order to fix all 
of it wouldn't actually result in customers beating our door dwn.

> No we don't need another slab allocator, but last time I checked nobody in
> Red Hat was writing one either. They are all far too busy working on stuff
> that needs doing.

We needed Ubuntu on Sparc64? A functional desktop is something that 
needs doing. We can quibble over what's actually required for a 
functional desktop (and I'll agree that evolution isn't a shining 
example of functionality), but I'm fairly convinced that getting system 
alerts to a relevant user in a timely manner is one component of it. 
Doing so via mail worked fine when most Unix systems were maintained by 
people who understood cron, but that's not current reality.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org