Hello, we’re just getting started around here. Find out about us and our editorial policy but remember, nothing is set in stone yet. We’re also not drawing from a very large pool: if you can recommend posts published since 27 June 2008, please suggest them for our next post.
Bugs
Mark Shuttleworth (Ubuntu) describes how important bug work is for distributions.
Free as in free
James Bottomley (Linux Foundation) compares the closed and open source driver models.
Brendan Scott (lawyer, AU community member) discusses closed source drivers and derivative works in the Australian context.
Design desicions
Bryce Harrington (Inkscape, Ubuntu) wishes user applications were more about streams of information and less about documents.
Debian had a lot of talk about the difficulty of visiting HTTPS sites without a trusted certificate using Firefox:
- Pierre Habouzit is seriously, seriously, seriously annoyed;
- Riku Voipo doesn’t like the HTTPS burden, but opposes bad solutions to it;
- Steve Langasek does like it; and
- Mike Hommey doesn’t like the UI design burden it imposes on all browsers using Gecko.
Packaging
Yaakov M. Nemoy (Fedora) is critical of the need for the LSB Packaging API.
Plumbing
Matthew Garrett (Fedora) makes the case for automatically determined power management settings.
Russell Coker (Debian) notes that reboots due to kernel security patches result in a non-trivial amount of downtime.
Version control
The GNOME blogs are all-in on distributed version control:
- Federico Mena-Quintero suggests how code archaeology would work after a Subversion to git conversion;
- Thomas Thurman thinks switching all GNOME projects at the same time is too much trouble;
- James Sharpe doesn’t think a choice needs to be made if the systems interoperate;
- Travis Reitter observes that git seems to be the sensible choice of distributed version control given its userbase.
Meanwhile, in X land:
- Lennart Poettering advocates git as the DVCS everyone knows best;
- Alberto Ruiz doesn’t like git’s UI or design;
- Adam Jackson points out CVS’s UI weaknesses; and
- Daniel Stone values git’s stable internal format.
Romain Francoise (Debian) is graphing VCS usage by Debian software.
Translations
Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay (GNOME, Fedora) reviews the state of Firefox localisation in Indic languages.
Ivory tower
Biella Coleman (Debian) recommends Chris Kelty’s “Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software”.
Women in Free Software
Miriam Ruiz (Debian) asks about the possibility of a glass ceiling in Debian.
