I am still trying to sort through all of the things that happened at that meeting.
I find that while I am writing about it, it is easier to list the fact and the
view and then I have to dive into a world of memories and fuzzy impressions to
make sense of it. I am also trying to GIMP up a couple of images that there is
no way a camera could have really captured the moment -- or the camera was not
with me at the time.
Every second seemed packed with very personal moments and memory triggers. This
makes four days (and about two spent in the aircraft) seem more like a lifetime and very difficult to write about. While
I work through these things that are bottled up in my brain still, I thought it
was about time to get the GTK+ developers their own planet and maybe look into
updating the GTK+ web site. The first attempt is running happily in my space on the GIMP Web Site.
It was difficult for me to change my mind about going to the meeting. It was not
difficult to be happy with the decision once I made it. The only things I would
change about how the event was handled and ran is that I would not schedule any
talks before 10am and probably there would have been more mingling between the
different applications represented there if we had started it with a day of BOF.
This way, you can get the "seeing and meeting" in your project out of
the agenda first thing, freeing up the rest of the time to invade the other projects.
Even on the last day, the projects still pooled or puddled together.
Thank you, everyone!
I started to use Debian when the gimp developers told me it would be the best
way to work with them. I had seen this linux stuff I was using on my computer as a joy to
maintain myself and learn how to use and also, I liked seeing how the software
I used was improved and/or maintained. I also admit that much of it was beyond my understanding
and that I needed help with it.
It is years later. Blind faith in groups of people working together has failed me. For instance,
I am a woman who uses Debian, yet I read that the actual Debian women (seem to) think that not stating
a fact is the same thing as a fact not existing. When I read crap like that, I know that I do not
belong there. For instance, if you are a straight male and would actually like to meet intelligent
women who share your interests, apparently, (according to the Debian women) Debian is not for
you1. How sad. Where are straight men supposed to go when they would
like to find an equal instead of an feeble needy thing? Perhaps, this is against policy or something.
Honestly, I have had similar issues with other women in other groups (where
simply forcing people to say or not say something is not yet understood to be ineffectual on changing
the real fact) and that I am
probably much older than the majority of "the debian women" -- I really do not belong
there, nor to I have any desire to watch these painful truths get learned by yet another dominating
group of beings. They are as free to stay out of my business as I have been free to stay out of
theirs.... You are free to do that, by the way, free to stay out of my business, that is. Have you
seen how I do this? I just let you work. I do not dictate what you do. I do not try to socially
engineer you. I think that you are intelligent and decent enough to figure it out. I patiently await
the day when people stay out of my business this way. It is simple and decent and good.
Onto libtiff, though. This is what this web log entry is about. I want (for myself) this one simple
thing. I want to remove libtiff from my computer. Sure, it is only 1.7M (as Ari pointed out to me over and over again. It
is not the size of the library that matters. It is the fact that it is my computer. It is the fact
that it has been at least one year and maybe by now several years since I have opened an image that
was in tiff format. It is the fact that I have built my own gimp without this library before. It is
the fact that I am interested in color management, so much so that there is no way in hell that I
would trust it to anything libtiffy. I would like to see how much can be done without the library.
My approach to this is not to ask debian to work "--without-libtiff". I understand enough
about building binaries for distribution, making a special build of gimp like this is wrong and mostly
ineffective and basically a sorry waste of time. As Ari pointed out, it would be insane to build
so many different versions of gimp (you can see how many possibilities there are if you get the gimp
source yourself and type "./configure --help"). I would not ask any distribution to do this.
I move along now, thinking I have clearly stated two things so far. 1)that it is my personal choice
not to have libtiff installed on my computer and 2)that I do not expect that all of Debian work this
way.
Eh, one more point to make first.... Whether it was a correct idea or not, when I first started to
depend on a distribution, I thought that the deal was this: I let the distribution have everything
in the first level of the operating system. Like Debian gets /usr/, /share/, /etc/, /var/, /lib/, etc.,
and I get to have /usr/local/. This is also how it seemed to work at first. Things certainly have
changed since then and now (probably due to some policy
or something) Debian is looking at what is in /usr/local/ and Debian reacts to this. It is so
easy to make things work without that. I claim that it was more difficult to set the system
up so that it did look there. Please, stay out of my business there!
I am not complaining about the following list. I am also not complaining about how much the freaking
activity level on MY computer ceased when I removed the
Debian built binaries from my computer (although, probably I should....2). I only list the complicated
chain of software that Debian has allowed to depend on libtiff (in alphabetical order):
- atk
- cairo
- fontconfig
- freetype
- glib
- librsvg
- pango
so far....
Debian, apparently is very generous in what it expects from you and your computer. They provide
(just for you) a version of libtool which will not build software properly (see my earlier rant about
where Debian is doing its business on my computer). The Debian brand
of libtool will fail while building librsvg, unless you do some hocus pocus and promise to build away
from Debians sight. Probably, to remove libtool and install a functioning version, I will need to
also remove all of the build tools
(and build them myself). So, while it hurt me some at this point, I opted to go ahead and work with
a gimp that cannot import paths (thanks, Debian).
Now it is cairo that will not build:
Assembler messages:
Error: symbol `_cairo_pixman_composite' is already defined
make[3]: *** [fbpict.lo] Error 1
If I remove the Debian cairo, I must remove all of the X Server. 25171709 whatevers (according to
"ls -l") of tarballs to build myself have been useless so far. In defense of Ari, he
warned me that to get rid of libtiff would be the same as linux from scratch. 1.7M of Debian
impotence. Keep up with the social-engineering and writing policy and removing documentation from
people who need it.
GIMP Developers, I tried it. It did not work. The more I use Debian, the less I am able to work
with you. Perhaps this was the goal. If I could just have my stuff and my life and my respect for
people back, I really would just go away and let the people who made this mess continue to work with
it. I don't think that I did this.
on teletubbies...
Not having enjoyed the television program or also, not having enjoyed watching my babies enjoy
this television program, I can only share with you two things that other women told me about it.
One insight from my friend, a mother of two children told me this about teletubbies. She said that
she had more problems with her older child watching it because it seemed to be geared towards
children who are three years old or younger. If I remember correctly, she told me that her concern
was not that the teletubbies would affect her male childs sexual orientation or anything like that.
Her concern was that her older daughter was watching it and it seemed to
encourage her older daughter to make baby talk instead of using her already present more adult-like
verbal skills. Something like this:
(loudly, to get attention from the very young) BAY-BEE-TALK, coo coo gibber jabber...
Don't talk to me like that. Or stop talking to me like that. I would never ever talk to you like
that, even if you are a baby. If it is misplaced respect on my part, forgive me.
My other friend, also a mom, but her thoughts about the teletubbies were more about the first
desktop image that WindowsXP provided for her. An intelligent and busy woman, she took the time to
hear the respectful things I knew about the people who were working on gimp at that time and to
project them onto the people who made XP for her. She told me that it occured to her that they put
this image of the teletubbies grassy field on her computer because they considered her to have the
intelligence of a zero to three year old. It made her laugh, and she was too busy and invested to
actually respond to the message, and, whether or not it was an accurate assessment of the message
from the good people who were making XP or not is moot. The fact that she responded to my description
of the people I was working with and got that feeling from her software says a lot.
I only installed it because I wanted to work on GIMP. I see the error of my ways now. I was very
wrong to put such faith in any distribution. Working on GIMP was to the best of my knowledge, an
open invitation to do whatever to me. I really would like to think that the debian women are not going
through the same crap that I have since installing that stuff on my computer.
1Honestly, things are broken on my computer and I have no means
to dig up the url(s) I am citing here. There is a lot of crap to read during these elections and I
had no idea that there was so much crap to read until these elections.
2Probably, the time to do this has come and gone (since everyone must
go through a child to get to me now), but what is wrong
with asking for access to a computer as opposed to stealing it? I used to be proud to share my
computer with friends. If you were using my computer, and need to continue, please, just tell me what you are doing,
be specific and decent and lets see what we can do. I have no idea how sheltered I have been, nor
how limited my understanding of this world is. I can just as easily say that I do not know these
same things about you. When you steal, you are probably assuming things that are not yours to assume.
I propose this one single policy first, and I have a strong feeling that many, many of the other
policies will not be needed if you roll back your idea and purpose and start to follow this one
single idea:
Debian Policy is to respect you and your abilities. We have engineered our distribution to be
there for you when you need it, we are also interested in respecting and maintaining your right to
build, use and work with your own
software as you need or desire or are able to. We have no interest in stupid users, however, we
are more than willing to run everything for them. We are as interested in a strong and intelligent
user base and this is and will be the basis of our
combined effort. We who call ourselves Debian have made it our policy to keep our noses out of
/usr/local and we vow to only manage what you ask us to install in the rest of your computers system
directories. You can be as dependent or independent on us as you wish, and we are proud to package things
this way. We are actually proud that our software is there for you as you learn about it and gone
when you ask that from us as well.
Perhaps Debian wants to be an evil monopoly, where all competition is just simply excluded and all users are
too remain stupid and dependent. I will be reading blogs to see if this is really the case now. How
pathetic if it is to be the case. Sad and pathetic. Pathetic and sad. Debbie could have probably
done better.... I wonder how long it would take to fix it?
I asked tigert to "bring out the bot!"
yesterday and he did. Gill is a perlbot who remembers what he hears and uses these
phrases in future conversations. This bot hasn't been seen on #gimp for over 1500
days and the phrases he knows are from those days when gimp development was not so
much like Predator playing chess with Alien. Phrases quite honestly from before my
time, even. A bot too stupid not to understand that logic like this:
13:38 (Gill) I like to do a redundant project (mp3 player, rpg, irc client etc)
but i don't understand how to draw straight lines in gimp.
is actually the way good software is made. Clueless bots!
I have not seen the code that makes Gill work, but it sure *looks* like he
spent some of his awake time reviewing the planet software, and it seems like an
honest and favorable review....
14:32 (Gill) A planet is a mixture of chalk and clay used for filtering urine
from the shoulder of an idiot it's not a digicam database.
It was so good to see tigert and his software again....