Haecceity

Yup, the long wait is finally over and thanks to a cast of thousands 2.2.3 is now in experimental.

I’d like to extend thanks to Mark and Canonical for sponsoring much of the original work, and also the sprint at the start of this year that got most of the remaining work done.

What we really need now is lots of upgrade reports so we can figure out how much automated help a 2.0->2.2 upgrade can reliably provide, and also where. I’ve been running these packages in production for some time so I’m not that concerned about overall stability, but I’ve not been using some of the weirder modules. We also need to get third-party module packages to stage updated packages into experimental built against 2.2

Both of these come via Newshog; the first is a very interesting article from NBC talking about the ”unprecedented cooperation and coordination” between US and UK officials; unprecedented in this case appears to mean ”arguing all the way to the police station”, but this is just according to one unnamed UK official, so possibly a pinch of salt required. The article goes on to mention in passing the arrest of the ringleader, Rashid Rauf, in Pakistan, apparently causing another disagreement between the US and the UK over choice of jurisdiction - which some are linking to the possibility of torture.

There are some fantastic quotes in the NBC article, regarding the timing and actual preparedness of the “attack”, especially that ”the suspects in Britain had obtained at least some of the materials for the explosive but had not yet actually prepared or mixed it.” and that ”the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.”. All this added up begins to bring serious doubt as to the actual danger represented by the terrorists, and also raises the question of what a more “hands-off” - not arresting the suspects, but allowing them to continue their preparations longer - approach to monitoring and intelligence gathering would have resulted in.

The second is interesting in its own right - Max Hastings - friend of Lady Thatcher, dyed in the wool Conservatist - writing for the Guardian - left/liberal and proud of the fact - leads his article with “George Bush sometimes sounds more like the Mahdi, preaching jihad against infidels, than the leader of a western democracy”

(edited to link to Wikipedia’s conservative party page.)

One Self - Bluebird is the track on the Nextmen mix cd that I hadn’t worked out.

The “foiled” terrorist attack looks suspiciously like an attack on the underlying system, rather than an actual attempt to blow planes up - it’s almost laughable that terrorists in this day and age could hope to get explosive devices onto planes in hand luggage.

If we decide that the terrorists aren’t stupid, the attack begins to look decidedly different. They’ve succeeded in causing absolute chaos in one of the busiest weekends in the british airline calendar, the effects of which will probably drag on for a few days. If you wanted to be really nasty, they’ve also caused a large number of people to be trapped in one place, and extremely vulnerable to attack. The BBC report says Heathrow Terminal 1 is “jam packed”.

I suspect that a terrorist organisation will look at something like this as relatively cheap, too - 18 peons arrested, sure, but we know they can afford the manpower and they’ve once again demonstrated that the air travel infrastructure our society is so reliant on is extremely fragile and vulnerable.

I had my first introduction to the Sol10 installer today. Oh My. For anyone who has ever complained that Debian is hard to install, go try solaris and then come back. Dependency resolution? Sure, we can tell you what dependencies you’ve missed. Then you get to go hunt around the appallingly laid out tree of packages (subtrees with one package in, no indication of what subtree a requirement might be in) trying to find the thing. Then you hope you’ve not missed something else, otherwise, repeat ad infinitum. And the granularity of the thing is just dreadful. I’ve ended up with all kinds of crap installed that I’ll never use just because something else that I’ll never ever use, but is a required package, depends on it.

And Heaven forbid that you should wish to search for something in the package list.

I walked back into our office and the Solaris Admin I share an office with tells me about all this cool stuff you can do, that is utterly undocumented in the manual as far as I can tell, that would actually be a really useful default, like Live Upgrades.

And don’t get me started on the package system itself, especially not when you have to throw the abortion that is Blastwave into the mix. Tim Bray has also mentioned just how good the Debian/Ubuntu packaging system is in comparison, and wonders why Sun aren’t investing quality engineering time in making it work on Solaris.

In contrast, the Ubuntu installer’s approach of installing the bare minimum and letting the packaging system do the work post install feels to me like the perfect method for installing a server.