After Bdale blogged about the 5.25" floppy drivers he had in his Fido BBS, I googled a bit and found the following nice gems: http://www.wps.com/FidoNet/FidoNews/1985/FIDO228.NWS:

        ============================================================
                                  NEWS
        ============================================================
        Bdale Garbee
        Sysop of L5NET Gateway, Fido 129/13
              Some Utilities I'm Looking for and Haven't Found
        There are a few public domain utilities I would like to
        locate for my Fido host, which I have unfortunately not yet
        found in my random wanderings around other Fido systems.
        I'm running a Tandy 1200HD, which is an IBM XT-clone.
        If you have any of the things I'm looking for, either send
        them to me by Fidomail, or send me a message detailing how
        I can get them.  Emphasis on public domain.  Sources
        desirable but not absolutely necessary (beggars can't be
        choosers!) 
.../...

http://www.wps.com/FidoNet/FidoNews/1986/FIDO333.NWS:

     =================================================================
                                  NOTICES
     =================================================================
     Announcing the return of the "HIP Shack" to Fidonet, now in
     Colorado Springs, CO.  The files and message areas are in
     the process of being reorganized, but Amateur Radio and SWL
     are still the primary themes.  I'm looking forward to
     hearing from everyone I've been out of touch with for the
     last 9 weeks...
     Bdale Garbee, sysop 128/18, 303/593-0766, 1200 baud, 24hrs

This seems to confirm that, despite our 6 months age difference (guess who wins?), Bdale is way much an old timer than my poor self, whose first appearance in the BBS world is around 1990. Anyway, I found this funny and wanted to share. Enjoy...

Gunnar, thanks for the pictures of the Oaxtepec place. Which triggers me one question: how are we supposed to *pronounce* the place's name? The "x" is kinda puzzling in names coming from the local languages in Mexico. Having a map of the combined Mexico/Oaxtepec area handy somewhere would also help to prepare local sightseeing in the neighbourhood. Up to now, I just know that Oaxtepec is somewhat 60kms south of downtown Mexico (which makes it in the suburbs according to the giant size of the city). And, Gunnar, don't worry: I *still* plan to come back in Mexico next summer with my family. Probably not the best season, but the "kids", if I still can call them kids, have school in May, so coming at that moment is not an option. Only too bad that I really can't come a few days before Debconf and enjoy the El Pacifico train from Los Mochis to Chihuahua, which I planned to ride. To people coming to Debconf AND who have time: DO IT. The Copper Canyon train ride is for sure one of the things you have to see in Mexico. Then come back from Chihuahua to Mexico with a bus ride (a cheap bus, just like the local people do), eventually stopping for one day in Guadalajara. I bet you will then appreciate this small bit of real mexican life.

As usual, I try booking flights as early as possible. So, here, for Debconf6, I just booked my flights to Mexico. I'll leave Paris on May 13th 19h25, to Madrid, on Iberia. From there, I'll leave to Mexico, on Iberia 6401 on May 14th at 01:50 and arrive in Mexico on May 14th, 06:35. The return flight will leave Mexico on May 22th at 12:05, Iberia 3402. Arrival in Madrid at 06:00 on May 23th, then run into Paris plane leaving at 07:20 and back home at 09:15. Total cost (including EUR22 for cancelling insurance, which is safer when booking that early): EUR694. Something between EUR650 and EUR750 is what you can currently get when booking from Western Europe to Mexico. This is an interesting schedule, imho, with not too much lost time on the travel to Mexico, and two nights in the plane (not that common: East-West flights often do not include a night in the plane). The return flight is a minor risk of missing the very last events of Debconf but, as usual, the last day is the day where people leave so I hope that organizers will not setup too much stuff then. The direct flights by Air France were less convenient and noticeably more expensive (about EUR 750). However, Air France might be a good option....for non-French people....:-) See you in MEX!

Philip, I *already* have to use darcs because Daniel Burrows uses it for aptitude.:-)

After i angrily blogged about the suckiness of tla/baz (bzr should be forgotten as it seems it does not have tla's brain dead design)., James Blackwell quickly mailed me with a solution to my problem. It involved manually creating a directory with a funky name in my last patch directory. And I have to say to it worked out of the box. So, James, you rock and I am very grateful to you for the solution. tla and baz still suck with this incredibly complicated tree setup but I've been pointed that bzr will not suck. So let me believe you, guys...but please don't change for Yet Another Thing lext year..:-)

This is the new hype of last years. No development can take place with these so cool tools. Crap, I just maintain the bloody localization for apt and dpkg and, as the developers of these packages use distributed revision control systems, I'm forced to use them as well. I have never lost so much time in fixing broken stuff in my archives. OK, I'm a moron certainly but I use RCS things for several years right now (the old CVS/SVN and the like with a centralized repository) and I HAVE NEVER LOST SO MUCH TIME since I use tla, than bazaar. More fun: it seems that baz is getting obsoleted by bzr right now as obviously geeks cannot live more than one year with the same tool. So I will have to convert my archives if I want to continue helping in apt/dpkg localization. Of course, I know that people will help morons like me to do it, but, hey, this will AGAIN be lost time. Thanksfully, the D-I developers are wise people and we don't use distributed RCS but a good old solid SVN for 3 years now. Frans, Joey, don't ever think about changing this, please.... So now, I'm left with a change that I can't commit in my local archive for a French man page of dpkg, as suddenly for no reason, the bloody baz complains:

A/  arch /dpkg/dpkg--devel/dpkg--devel--1.13/philippe.batailler@free.fr--2005
A/
 arch /dpkg/dpkg--devel/dpkg--devel--1.13/philippe.batailler@free.fr--2005/patch-log
A
 arch /dpkg/dpkg--devel/dpkg--devel--1.13/philippe.batailler@free.fr--2005/patch-log/patch-1
M  man/fr/dpkg.1
M  debian/changelog
M  ChangeLog
arch_commit: unable to acquire revision lock (could not rename file.)
tree: /home/bubulle/src/debian/dpkg/dpkg-1.13
revision: bubulle@debian.org--2005/dpkg--devel--1.13--patch-88
url: /home/bubulle/arch/bubulle@debian.org--2005

So nice: I'll again waste precious time asking on IRC for help and hearing people telling me to switch to <insert your favorite RCS system here>. This will be a so wonderful Sunday....

Thanks to Andrew Pollock, I now know how to write "ba onnette" in English. "now know how": nice....probably wrong but nice. Andrew, continue with your life experience of weird things happening to Australian people left in Californian jungle.

Yesterday, Tollef pointed me that he actually held the Debian Installer development lead for a while. Point taken, Tollef, I certainly didn't want to hide your contribution, I just wasn't aware of this part of D-I history. This lead me to come back at a small pet project: write down the history of the Debian Installer development. So, I went back to this short document I began to write a while ago. Not yet structured and just a collection of random pointers up to now. Given that my own involvment in D-I began only in October 2003 (funnily with a rant-style message to Joey which I'm now ashamed of), I'm missing the earlier parts of the story. Contributions welcomed.

So, the D-I team again made it: a new release of the "installer with no name yet" happened. First of all, yet another occasion to publicly reward Joey Hess work. Joey has managed to lead this work for five and a half years. I think that we all agree that without Joey's work, we wouldn't have such a nice installation system for our distribution. Joey now gives the lead to Frans Pop. Knowing Frans as we know him now, I'm confident that the good work will go on. Joey will have more time to hack in various parts of D-I or lead the testing security team. From my narrow point of view, I'm again proud that we cover more and more languages. The official announcement mentions 9 of them. We can add Vietnamese to it, even if the installer has a broken display in second stage because of a now solved localechooser bug. As a consequence, we continue to paint the world map in red. The next big push on that matter will be the release of a graphical version of the installer (an alpha version is already advertised) which will support the rendering of the various languages from india for which translation is on its way.

Hmmm, dear LWN, Anthony Towns is not alone when claiming that the reaction of the Debian community towards Nexenta after they announced their work was probably overflated and certainly too much aggressive. I remember having done so already and I did it again later. I usually avoid debian-devel flamewars but here, this is not really a flamewar. This was a rude action against people who may have done mistakes, errors and certainly need to talk deeper with the Debian community. Even if the contributors in this thread do not think they have been rude, I'm pretty much sure they have been "perceived" as being rude by outsiders. I'm afraid that such behaviour is very likely to enforce a very commonly feeling among the free software community of Debian being a kindergarten of free software bigots completely disconnected from real life. We know we are not this so we should try to avoid people thinking we are. This is not why I work in this project. When it comes at Free Software, I'm a kind of "bigot" too, but I usually try to not enforce my bigotry to other people by being uselessly aggressive. This also is a key point for Free Software and we should more often think about it. (don't take the word "bigot" as first degree, please...) We (as a community) have been aggressive with Nexenta about this issue, just like we have been in the past with, say, Ubuntu. So, I wish that we'll sing along with Erast Benson at next Debconf just like some did at Debconf 5 with the Shuttleworth gang. I wish I would see more Debian contributors bringing this feeling in -devel, especially our "historical" contributors, just like Ian Murdock did. Don't be shy, people..:-)

Hmmm, dear LWN, Anthony Towns is not alone when claiming that the reaction of the Debian community towards Nexenta after they announced their work was probably overflated and certainly too much aggressive. I remember having done so already and I did it again later. I usually avoid debian-devel flamewars but here, this is not really a flamewar. This was a rude action against people who may have done mistakes, errors and certainly need to talk deeper with the Debian community. Even if the contributors in this thread do not think they have been rude, I'm pretty much sure they have been "perceived" as being rude by outsiders. I'm afraid that such behaviour is very likely to enforce a very commonly feeling among the free software community of Debian being a kindergarten of free software bigots completely disconnected from real life. We know we are not this so we should try to avoid people thinking we are. This is not why I work in this project. When it comes at Free Software, I'm a kind of "bigot" too, but I usually try to not enforce my bigotry to other people by being uselessly aggressive. This also is a key point for Free Software and we should more often think about it. (don't take the word "bigot" as first degree, please...) We (as a community) have been aggressive with Nexenta about this issue, just like we have been in the past with, say, Ubuntu. So, I wish that we'll sing along with Erast Benson at next Debconf just like some did at Debconf 5 with the Shuttleworth gang. I wish I would see more Debian contributors bringing this feeling in -devel, especially our "historical" contributors, just like Ian Murdock did. Don't be shy, people..:-)