Re: Some news

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

On Tue, 18 May 1999, JF Martinez wrote:

> Perhaps you are right.  In the other hand I ever felt it was
> ridiculous when the isolated user finds dozens of servers sitting
> there wasting memory and being potential security holes (the only

I've also thought this. It's easy to use a lot of memory.

> really secure program is the one who is never started).  Of course we
> could take the option: "if they are installed that means they are
> wanted so they must run" and content us with a thorough revision in

I like this philosophy. Of course, we still need to address inetd.

> You cannot.  In the install you are prompted for servers, not for
> inted services.  You are not prompted at all in workstation installs.

maybe we should ship a different inetd.conf for the
workstation/homestation installs. It certainly shouldn't allow remote
ftp/telnet logins or remote fingers.

Another option would be to just give them a hosts deny file like this:

ALL:ALL

This seems harsh, but it's better to force the user to need to know
something to bring services up, rather than having to know something to
turn them off. 

> competitors (strong rumors).  However you could think Star Division
> had learned the lesson.  No, they hadn't..

I think this says more about binary compatibity problems between distros
and versions of glibc than it does about Star Division. You can hardly
accuse them of MS-like behaviour ( they wrote the app but not the API )

> > very easy to do if you are starting via {x,k,g}dm because you can save the
> > STDERR from the X server.
> 
> Are you sure?  You will go through xinit and lose control on what
> happens later.  

take a look at /etc/X11/xdm-config. There's a resource called
DisplayManager.errorLogFile

> Of course.
> 
> Now of my old manias: Do we ship a gimp 1.1 or do we stick with an
> "enriched" GIMP 1.0 (ie ship the unofficial plugins)?

how stable is GIMP 1.1 ? gimp 1.0 is pretty good on features already, so
this somewhat lowers ones interest in having something new ( and possibly
broken ). I vote for 1.0 with all the newest plugins added unless 1.1
looks really stable.

-- Donovan