Mandrake rehabilitated

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

Having attacked Mandrake for "free riding" on support from app
development teams in these fora, it is my responsibility to let you
know that XEmacs and Mandrake have worked out their differences to the
full satisfaction of XEmacs.  I'm afraid that Mandrake is not so happy
yet (AFAIK they just undid the patch we found so offensive, and don't
yet have an alternative solution in place).  However, we will
cooperate on that, and that's the important news.

IMO, there still are important issues about allocation of support
responsibility between app developers and distro developers,
especially in cases like Debian and Mandrake that make strong efforts
to enforce distribution-wide consistency.  I still believe that this
is going to cost effort on somebody's part, and the fair allocation of
that effort is something the free software community hasn't fully
worked out yet.  I still think this will make support of distros
designed to be user-friendly less user-friendly than it should be, at
least in the near term.

That said, I fully support Mandrake's attempt to create a more user-
friendly GNU/Linux distro.  Now that their position vis-a-vis the apps
has been clarified, I believe that conflicts about design,
configuration, and support issues will be resolved cooperatively and
to the benefit of users.  We can't wish the conflicts themselves away,
but we can and will work them out.


-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
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What are those straight lines for?  "XEmacs rules."