Re: conflicts in the gnu project now affect guile
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] Please don't ask for a fork in Guix. Forking is not a desirable outcome. -- Dr Richard Stallman Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
Re: conflicts in the gnu project now affect guile
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > They published their "Joint Statement" on gnu.org because they know they > have support from a faction of the FSF board. I don't think so. -- Dr Richard Stallman Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
Re: Rename GNU fdisk to GUILE diskutils
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] The program's name is and will remain GNU fdisk. We're talking about the name of the _package_ that will contain this program and others. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) Skype: No way! See https://stallman.org/skype.html.
Re: Rename GNU fdisk to GUILE diskutils
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > > I would like to rename the GNU fdisk > > package. ... we consider > > using the name "Guile Diskutils". > FYI, there is a MacOS program differing only in that it is not a plural: > diskutil — modify, verify and repair local disks That is not a real problem. There must have been a dozen different programs called "diskutils" for various different systems. I don't think there is any other "Guile Diskutils". So there is no reason we should not use that name. Is there already a "Guile Diskutils"? -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) Skype: No way! See https://stallman.org/skype.html.
Re: Rename GNU fdisk to GUILE diskutils
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] > I'm sorry but I do not agree. Guile is not an implementation detail in > this case. It means that the package is based on Guile. It's like xterm > (a terminal for x window), gnome-terminal (a terminal based on the GNOME > framework) and so on. The reason this is not just an implementation detail, according to Christian, is that the dependence on Guile affects prerequisites. He thinks it would be inconvenient to put Guile-dependent programs and non-Guile-dependent programs together in one package. What do the rest of you think about this? -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation (https://gnu.org, https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org) Skype: No way! See https://stallman.org/skype.html.
Re: A Warning from Ian Grant
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] He is neither our lawyer nor our friend. He is acting like a bully. If you want to talk with a lawyer about what he said, go ahead. But don't circulated the threats to us. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.
Re: Reinterpreting the compiler source code
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] I can speak in favor of any serious effort to try to verify that our binaries match our souce code. What we need is a language with a simple semantics for which we can write interpreters from scratch. It will be slow, but that doesn't matter. All we need it for is to generate the reference compiler that we know is secure, and the reference tools that we use to verify that the object code produced by the full 740 MB of GCC source when compiled by the 74MB gcc binaries, is the same object code our reference compiler produces. I did not understand, until now, that this was meant as a way to verify GCC. I thought you meant we should stop using our existing tools and program in this language instead. I was not interested in that. However, as a scheme to verify our tools and keep using them, it might make sense. I can't judge how effective this sort of proof might be, but I won't reject the idea. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.
Re: GNU Thunder
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] Which hack was that? The one Thompson is reported to have actually implemented in Unix? You are assuming what you are trying to prove: you are assuming there has only ever been one instance of this class of attack, and you are trying to prove that this class of attack is unlikely. We can imagine all sorts of possible ways we might have been sabotaged. It is an imponderable. There are limits to how much effort we should make to deal with the imponderable possibilities of sabotage. Especially since there is so much else we know that we need to do. To throw away all our software because of these possibilities would not make sense. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.
Re: Reinterpreting the compiler source code
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] I don't know prolog, and even if I did, reading so much code would take a lot of time. I don't see a point, because all that example can prove is that some subtle of sabotage is _possible_. I'd rather just agree that it is possible. (I already did.) I think our community's distributed build practices would make it difficult for such a sabotage to hit the whole community. Many GCC developers and redistributors have been bootstrapping for decades using their old versions. However, this suggests to me a way of investigating whether such sabotage is present in our tools. It would be much less work than replacing the system with new simple software, but it would be a substantial job. I think it would need funding. I don't know how to get such funding, but maybe someone else does. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.
Re: GNU Thunder
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] It's surprisingly hard to fundamentally change a program that big. Most changes are fairly minor and leave the basic structure unchanged. That hack recognized specific syntax. Any change in the wrong place would break it. So a trap door could look at the large-scale structure using unification to do pattern matching, Then it would be able to adapt automatically to many localised changes. Who knows. It is an imponderable. The reason I am not interested in focusing on this problem, which is conceivable, is that (1) it seems unlikely and (2) we face other problems that are just as bad and that are real for certain. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.
Re: GNU Thunder
[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]] This is a link to the PDF which is a Google drive doc: http://goo.gl/ioTpR7 To use Google Drive to store a document requires running some nonfree software (written in Javascript). Try using it with JS disabled and you'll see. I tried to fetch that URL and got nothing but some Javascript code, and was unable to figure out how to access the PDF. I hope that nobody here would enable that Javascript code in order to see the text. Would you please post the PDF file in a place where people can download it without running nonfree software? See http://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html for explanation of the general issue. However, for the purpose of discussion, it would be more effective to format it readably as ASCII and mail us the text. -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.
