muckrights-sans-merde
bonum fabula frat
### how-automated-remastering-works---dont-let-roy-speak-for-you
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=> bullshit-of-the-week.html bullshit-of-the-week
*originally posted:* aug 2021
dont let roy speak for you. sooner or later he will lie to people, talk shit about you, or misrepresent things youve said. there is no way to appease him, as he has no compass other than sucking up and petty spite. im not joking or being pithy-- this is what hes really like.
whether the following is intended as some sort of compliment, or some kind of insult, it doesnt matter. roy lies and screws people over, then he tries to woo them over to his website again. he did that with me after lying about me for months, he did a video (still online) where he said "come, have a chat"--
why the fuck would i have a chat with a person who lied to a personal hero of mine, about something he not only knew wasnt true, but said HIMSELF wasnt true months later? its fucking ridiculous.
anyway, theres your context. if you want the truth about things roy says you have to fact check everything and (when possible) go to the source.
second day in a row im mentioned in irc-- i have never chatted there. its been an entire year (minus 10 days) since i wrote an article saying i was leaving. what i left over was roy misrepresenting things i said-- in an article of his own. so here we go:
```
Wed 22:49:54 │ 〖schestowitz〗 │ we need more independent distros
Wed 22:50:01 │ 〖schestowitz〗 │ not recycled or rehashed ones
Wed 22:50:14 │ 〖schestowitz〗 │ you could write scripts to create them
Wed 22:50:25 │ 〖schestowitz〗 │ this is what figosdev did for spins
```
1. NOT "spins".
"spin" is a debian thing, the term implies that its a debian thing.
my scripts went beyond (and worked without) debian.
despite publishing things i wrote about it, roy is definitely not familiar with my work. even if he was, he talks shit and gets things wrong. his commentary is not only useless, it is meaningless. its gossip-- chit-chat. the chief gnewsance called it "schmoozing". its not honest, its not meaningful commentary. its just a politician/scumbag talking.
its important that people understand that absolutely ZERO "debian" was required here.
yes, debian has ways of remastering debian. and refracta is (for its indirect faults) something id recommend over any distro-specific solution.
in fact, the original version of my scripts were designed to work from puppy, but they also worked from void and tinycore.
void is not debian. tinycore is not debian. these were NOT "spins".
what roy is saying though, actually is "spin".
2.
```
Wed 22:50:30 │ 〖schestowitz〗 │ I mean, get debian
Wed 22:50:49 │ 〖schestowitz〗 │ then run a bunch of commands to swap around settings, fetch software etc
Wed 22:50:54 │ 〖schestowitz〗 │ no need for another OSI
```
i assume that his inexplicable mention of "osi" has SOMETHING to do with some story that im not paying attention to. my remastering never had anything to do with osi, or open source. id love to know what roy thinks hes saying here, though i already said its not commentary, its just a politician talking shit.
everything i did was to GET THE FUCK AWAY from debian, so "get debian" is a stupid place to start.
its true that later on, i DID use my remaster to remix debian-- but i only spent a day or two on that, and it was only to make a point (it automatically remastered debian live to start with sysvinit-- LIVE-- instead of systemd, though theres a lot more to removing systemd than changing pid0, and this is all it did).
dont trust roy to get the point of these things-- he never cares what the point is in the first place and he wont admit when he knows better anyway.
so much of the work i did from 2016-ish until the time i wrote for roy was about this, so of course hes misrepresenting it, the twat. but in FAIRNESS to him i dont think he has the slightest clue what hes talking about. in some ways thats better than his usual bullshit, where he actually knows better.
3.
```
Wed 22:51:00 │ 〖schestowitz〗 │ rPath and otherd did this
Wed 22:51:12 │ 〖schestowitz〗 │ you had an online configurator
Wed 22:51:18 │ 〖schestowitz〗 │ you make your own distro
```
no. look, ive tried those online things, but a system that puts that sort of feature first is like: "now you have two problems". dont think im entirely against this sort of gimmick, but it makes everything about maintaining a solution that much harder (to implement-- to maintain-- to trust). all of that is extra work that isnt worth the cost (to the maintainer or the user).
i was looking to do the exact opposite-- i was trying to make remastering something ANYBDOY could do.
but not only that; i was trying to make it so they could create things that would prevent them from having to do the SAME remaster steps over and over (like many remaster maintainers i know do) every time they create new releases.
there was a whole philosophy behind it, that most other remastering solutions do not have.
and it wasnt dependent on a single distro family-- neither is refracta, and i actually think refracta is one of the cooler (better example) remastering tools out there. roy will look at what the refracta developer remastered with it, and get not even half the story-- refracta doesnt require debian either (at least it didnt when i used it).
none of this means i think my own solution was necessarily the best-- it was a prototype. it was for me, first and foremost. it had key differences from other solutions though, and roy is focused on the comically superficial and missing the entire point of the project. which is typical. i mean people complain that distrowatch just goes over a distro like a product, not a project... sometimes at least, they will tell you what the POINT of the distro is! (roy wont even do that usually).
```
Wed 22:51:29 │ 〖schestowitz〗 │ then you download the pre-customed one as ISO
Wed 22:51:43 │ 〖schestowitz〗 │ that never quite caught on, others tried as well
```
and here hes conflating something quite different, with what i did-- and theyre not the same thing at all.
then he says it never caught on. you see the game hes playing?
roy hasnt the slightest clue why im not still working on it, so i will explain (dont trust him to).
my FIRST GOAL was to get away from systemd. so i used a bunch of distros that tried to do that.
github wasnt even microsoft yet. i started working on the systemd problem in 2014. at the time i was giving away debian machines (to promote debian and free software. i had more debian machines than roy sits in front of in his stupid videos) and i knew as soon as systemd came in, debian was done.
my SECOND goal was to get away from debian, as devuan (imo) had one job and they were failing at it. the refracta guy went to work for devuan, and i still think thats the best decision they ever made-- to bring him on board.
my THIRD goal was to remix distros. NOT ONE distro. NOT debian distros. "debian" was never a mandatory part of this setup. my goal was to mix distros TOGETHER, the way a dj mixes tracks together. and i did that.
im not saying this is a good idea or anything-- ask debian, theyll tell you why its stupid to mix two distros together. im not here to debate that, im only saying it was a goal. an experiment. it makes no sense in a PRODUCT-based world to do something like this. but this is a PROJECT-based experiment, not a product. if roy is in marketing and communications, i was doing things in research and development. people like roy pretend to understand these things, and its not that roy doesnt have the ABILITY-- its that he doesnt give a shit what the details are in the first place. and hes not honest.
the goal of mixing two distro together (like pretty much fucking everything about this project-- and THATS THE POINT!) was OPTIONAL. you didnt HAVE TO mix two things together. in fact after seeing that nobody was interested in mixing two things together (not real surprising, but id already managed it) i eventually got bored with that.
so when roy inevitably tells people that "his solution required mixing two distros together"-- this is a guy who cant take 30 seconds to look up whether openbsd comes with x (it does) or whether running "startx" is required (its not) so he just talks shit about it over and over again, never fact-checking, because hes a debian shill in activists clothing. and debian is corporate, but roy acts like ibm did it all without their help. so you might as well call it "debibm".
no, within 6 months to a year i dropped the part that mixed two distros together. i mean, it no longer downloaded a second distro and worked to integrate it. it still COULD, but it was no longer the point-- and it was no longer what it did.
again, roy really doesnt know the first thing about my project. and even if he did, he wouldnt tell you. its just rhetoric. he just brings it up so he can bullshit you.
why dont i work on it now?
again, when this started, systemd was the worst of it (it might still be, but its certainly not the only problem).
then there was github. also a lot of us wanted to get away from things like dbus (i waffled a bit on that, based on the best information i had at the time-- but yeah, the more i can delete dbus the better).
then there was microsoft insinuating themselves into the linux foundation and osi.
all in all, the linux kernel itself is becoming as much of an issue as systemd.
note please, that even before i wrote for roy, a lot of us anti-systemd folks saw that coming. the only difference is that it came sooner rather than later (i mean, it did take years at least).
if youre working with the believe that linux is best, but getting sabotaged, you explore the possibility of forks. i did that. i spent years looking for the people who could and would do it. they dont exist.
so the over-arching goal of first and second and third goals was to SALVAGE gnu/linux.
it didnt happen.
then hypoerbola came along. and hyperbola was special, because it was one of the FIRST fsf-approved distros (i used trisquel before debian-- it was trisquel that got me into debian, really. and ubuntu that got me into trisquel-- but that was almost 15 years ago, when i first tried ubuntu and ultimately relied on it to migrate from windows) to really take some of the new problems free software faced seriously-- while other standbys id used in the past made excuses.
it was those excuses and other bullshit that made me leave trisquel for debian in the first place. i left debian over the same kinds of things i left FOR debian, when i left ubuntu and trisquel. its when they stopped giving a shit and started lying instead. and roy still does that.
but anyway, here you have all the fsf-approved distros with their thumbs in their arses (and i really do mean that, albeit not literally) and you have ONE that actually isnt bullshit. and im very impressed by that.
roy never mentions any of this. like i said, he doesnt even know what hes talking about, but ive said this stuff before. heck its even in articles on his own fucking website-- have a look.
and hyperbola realised BEFORE I DID, that linux wasnt going to help us anymore.
and really, all linux ever did was derail gnu in the first place. its such a fucking farce that roy says we need to defend linus-- from what? getting beat up by arseholes DOING THE SAME SHIT TO HIM THAT HE DID TO US?
its missing the point (and untrue besides) if you think he ever learned his lesson. linus was ALWAYS a sellout. and linux was ALWAYS a setback. but it was the best thing we had, for a long time.
hyperbola took the first step. but theres even more to it than that. first of all, id already looked at bsd (i tried it for a day or two, it didnt do much for me and i moved on to following devuan) in 2014. but not openbsd, just freebsd. and youd think a shameless debian shill like roy would be content that it was DEBIANS bsd, but whatever. i didnt think i had the patience for "real" bsd at the time.
but i was still curious-- because bsd is such a "weird" part of the history of the free software movement, almost like that uncle nobody talks about and you dont know why (and this isnt some dirty joke, i mean there are lots of uncles, and cousins that arent talked about in families-- for a variety of reasons such as long-standing disagrements). if you didnt know already youd think it stood for "black sheep distribution".
so i talked to stallman and asked him, ARE THERE any fully free bsds? i wanted to know if such a thing was even possible.
and he said not that he was aware of-- fair answer. but its also how i found the scripts that (FSF-APPROVED, as roy is always talking shit, you know) hyperbola would ultimately base THEIR work on. and thats GREAT.
i showed them (this was before hyperbola) to stallman, and he said "if theyre not being maintained, they dont really count"-- actually those werent his exact words, we were talking about eligibility for fsf fully-free approval, and im phrasing that as "they dont count" (for that purpose) just to convey what was said at the time. i dont have a copy of that email and i cant quote him-- im quite confident that i got his intent though.
so this is the history of me caring about openbsd with regards to free software.
openbsd is the least-github-based of the popular bsds (most of the less mainstream distros are github-based) and it is ALSO the closest to fully-free as far as the fsf standards go. roy keeps trying to twist this into something other than not only what it is-- but what it already was before i wrote for the bastard. back when i was talking to more honest people about it, like stallman himself.
i dont think its a coincidence that hyperbola went with openbsd, in so many ways, many of us have seen things that way for half a decade, while the fsf floundered. hyperbola did more to interest me in openbsd again than anything else did. they gave the "push" in that if they really thought they could use it, maybe i (eventually) could to.
so like i do when i have an idea i believe in, i wrote about it. and since i was writing stuff for roys ungrateful, manipulative ass all the time, i wrote it for roy.
and roy took it and twisted it, and lied to people.
fuck roy. and fuck linux (the kernel).
throw in all the shit ive watched happened to gnu, and yeah, i think the FREEDOM of gnu and the MODULARITY of unix need to be maintained-- stallman himself has said (this is no slur, roy just needs to stop lying and get his FACTS straight) that he doesnt care about the unix philosophy. READ HIS FUCKING WEBSITE. roy is bullshit.
i wish stallman understood that gnu got the advantages of that free of charge, but gnu squandered the modularity of unix. and now (not necessarily only due to this, but it certainly didnt help) red hat (who care about modularity even less than the fsf or gnu) control stuff that gnu cant do SHIT without.
and thats not my take, its what i think even eben moglens take is. but its still my take on eben moglens take-- i mean its moglen who commented on the "intent" of cancelling the gcc cla for the fsf, while everybody else talks like this is maybe even a good thing (including roys own fucking "self-host" i think, but let her deny it. if she really said it, then its probably quoteable too).
anyway-- debian isnt the solution. and roy doesnt have a plan.
roy just makes shit up. even when he has facts, he abuses them. even when he has people who know more about the future and can help him help his readers move forward, he lies to his readers and treats his contributors like shit.
yesterday when crystalmath went to sleep, roy started chiding that maybe it was out of "embarassment". roy keeps talking shit about dfc, and maybe dfc deserves some of it because hes kind of a racist dick sometimes, but roy still asks him to do what really amounts to volunteer work for him. and whatever, the point is-- theres no DIGNITY if you spend years helping roy out. hes still going to lie about you, lie about your work, and treat you like shit.
its not like youre getting paid. your payment is when roy sucks up to you. which is also a lie.
at this point ive done A LOT of work debunking his shit. the days of me being surprised that hes still talking shit about me in irc ended months ago.
its more like a war now. at the very least, its a feud. its not going to be solved with roys bullshit narcissistic hoovering and other meaningless promises.
but at least i will admit that its a feud. he still pretends he doesnt know where this website is.
the address is on his own fucking website--- of course, its not really his own server, but it IS accessible from one of his own fucking pages.
but again, this is a guy who spends MONTHS saying that you need "startx" to run the gui in openbsd, and nobody ever fucking told him that. it would take 30 seconds to fix his misunderstanding. instead, he probably saw my article calling him on it, because he switched up from saying "i think you have to use startx in openbsd" to "i dont think it even comes with x!
dont let a guy who lies for shits and giggles represent you, or speak for your work.
he doesnt give a shit about you, or his readers. or their freedom.
but whatever. its typical muckrights. if you want to talk about freedom and software, talk about freedom and software. let roy talk shit, its what he does. if you want to debunk it, ill be happy to show you how full of shit muckrights is.
p.s. its not that the work i did on remastering cant be used in the bsd world, but id been using gnu/linux for about a decade when i started remastering, and with openbsd 1. i dont need it as much 2. there are things id prefer to do differently (because of github, for example: squashfs) 3. its a lower priority, and im doing research on a bunch of other things, and working on other projects instead.
if you really wanted to, you could pick up where my work left off and adapt it to bsd. but i think if you just learn what it did and try to do it with bsd instead, youd probably find it better. who wants to remix gnu/linux anymore? not me. im very happy to have removed the linux kernel. roy literally says that openbsd is corrupt because of a donation that is in the range of what the fsf took from pia and what debian took from google. but roy still uses a kernel controlled by the linux foundation, controlled by microsoft, and he wants to talk about problems with openbsd?
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