Debian again hat a booth at the "Systems" fair in Munich. This is mostly a B2B fair, and the focus is on "ready to use" products. So there are few new product announcements happening here, and not this big audience as of IFA or CeBIT. Still it is an important fair for the medium and small sized businesses. Noone expects a PSP to be introduced there...

I staffed the booth on tuesday morning, and I intended to staff it on Friday morning, too (but was unable to do so). We were rather few people this year; also the organizational contribution of Jens (who died this summer) was missed a lot. Thanks to Michael Banck for organizing most things, and to all the other contributors such as Michael Ablassmeier and Simon Richter. See Michael Bancks blog posting for a complete list. Thanks also to e.g. the wikipedia staff, who managed to staff our booth for a few minutes while I went to the entrance to give Simon a free pass.

Tuesday morning was rather quiet, few people coming by, most of which are either already happy Debian users or at least know of it. Few donations, albeit the few LinuxTag DVDs left were gone (for a donation of at least 2 Euro) by noon. While I remember people asking all the time about the pretty posters with Ayo's artwork last year, and we had a bigger stock of them this time, noone asked while I was there. So on overall, I don't think it paid off for the project. :-(

A couple of people had technical questions which I was usually able to give the relevant pointers for solving them. The recurring question "when is sarge going to be released" was obviously not an issue any more; one guy asked when etch was going to be released and I was able to quickly pull out the announcement by the release team with the end-of-2006 schedule.

I was rather disappointed with the few people coming by, but probably tuesday morning was a rather unrepresentative time. The only two "important" conversations I had there was with someone from a PHP magazine who are interested in including a Sarge+PHP5+MySQL5 CD with an upcoming issue (I can't do that, I hope they'll find someone else to prepare the CD for them!) and with the people from LiMux (the upcoming linux switch of the city of munich) which sounded (to me) much like the current delay of the project is mostly due to management issues than due to Debian/GNU/Linux lacking some features. They couldn't really tell me what the Debian project could do to support LiMux.

Debian being used for LiMux is something I'm really looking forward to, and I would have loved to see a demo of it at the Systems, but apparently the project isn't that far yet. :-(

I didn't see much of the Systems otherwise - I had to hurry back to the university when I left the booth, so I didn't visit any other booth. The last few times it wasn't too interesting for me anyway, since none of the products (except the OSS projects) is targeted at my audience obviously. And I'm not the type to walk around to collect as many free CDs and ball pens as possible. I remember that last year you could have your face "imprinted" in a block of transparent resin with small bubbles or so; no idea if that was free or at a low charge, though. You used to get popcorn and such stuff at a couple of booths etc. - and a lot more of such stuff back in DotCom times - but it never interested me too much. And last year I think a conference hotel had the booth opposite of us and gave away free beer... anyway, I didn't even check if the LiMux booth maybe had one of these nice munich-penguin pins...

I had considered to walk around and ask for sponsorship at a coupld of places for some projects I'm invovled in, but I don't think I'm good at that anyway...

So my feelings are rather mixed. I really hope we'll have more people for the booth next year, because I'll not be available then: I'll hopefully be in finishing my diploma thesis by then.

So there is another example on bad software patents out. A company now claimed to own patents on the basics of XML (oh, and what about HTML, SGML etc.?).

This is just another example on how bad software patents can be.

It's outright ridiculous on what patents are filed nowadays.

The US really need to get rid of them, and the EU should avoid introducing them over another backdoor initiative...

I'd point out the British Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufacutres and Commerces "Adelphi charter", which is pretty clear on patents on computer code and abstract ideas...

Google is expanding it's empire. In fact it's becoming a threat with this big of an influence on public opinion just by being able to effectively "censor" information if they would want to. We need more diversity, IMHO.

With the latest rumors - Google Base - it seems that Google will be attacking new markets soon. Google Base could be a big threat to Craigslist and EBay, actually... (from what I've seen of Google Base, I find the phrase "Google wants to host your Databases" overstretches it a bit though...)

So what is Google up to? When is Google starting to sell books?

Google Talk isn't really big. It seems to be a nice product, but very few people are using it. I've never seen Google advertise it, so it's no wonder most people stick to their established IM/Voice services. But what's the point of it, when they don't adequately promote it? And whats behind that VPN service on their planned WiFi network in SF?

Is it about beta testing, maybe?

Google obviously wants to run company intranets. Company intranet search engines are a well-known product, and they for sure would like to expand that offer - offer email service, IM/voice, ...

From what I've read about their WiFi service, they would be allowed to run e.g. deep packet inspection stuff on it. Combined with Google indexing tech they could test e.g. filtering out pr0n sites. Or test a virus filter. And then offer that product to companies. So is a google firewall coming?

More obvious missing products in Googles portfolio are a document management and a customer relations management solution. Or a combination of both.

Google base might actually be part of an upcoming document management product by Google, I guess. And, I mean, wouldn't it be obvious for Google to offer a document management (and storage) solution to companies? As for CRM - a google CRM solution combined with their document management and indexing applications would beat any other product: add a user to the CRM and have the related files appear automatically due to google indexing, have the email correspondence added from the company gmail accounts...

With all the hype that was around it, I got myself a GMail account some time ago, when they were rather "rare". While the UI is still very good for a webmail, it has also a lot of things I do not like.

I don't use it heavily - not for personal emails, but only to recieve some mailing lists I don't want to clutter my regular mail (and there are no privacy issues there... Google will index them in the list archives anyway), and to recieve some off-site notifications by some servers (it's always better to get warning emails etc. off-site so you can still access them when the site is down... oh, and if you have an email relay, try to setup a direct transport for your email, so it works if there is something wrong with your email relay, too!)

My top issues with gmail are:

• Functions moving their location in the menus. E.g. when I empty my spam folder I always try to pick "delete" from the dropdown. But while the "delete" function is there in every other, it's not there in the Trash and Spam folders (instead it's a big button where the "Archive" button usually is).
• "Delete" is hidden away. GMail assumes that you don't want to delete any mail. But I do. There are so many mails not worth keeping at all! Especially with the logcheck mails I get - sometimes one every hour - I really want to delete them permanently. It's just of no use to keep them, all I want to review is that they do not contain important information (e.g. suggesting a hack attack, software or hardware fault) and then get rid of them.
• There is no keyboard shortcut for "delete" either
• GMail diverts my browsers /-shortcut for in-page searching to in-mailbox searching

I used gmails feedback function before, but didn't get any reply.

Christopher Aillon mentioned that people like NetworkManager a lot.

While I agree that NetworkManager is something nice, and especially people really expect "Desktop Linux" to have it, there are a lot of other issues.

I've tried netapplet, which is I think a predecessor. It looks just as fancy, but it doesn't really solve my needs. And in fact, I don't think NetworkManager can do that either (yet?).

As usual, it's a bit more than just picking the right essid and maybe displaying the network strength (which doesn't work in netapplet for me, the hostap driver lists a quality of 0 for all networks, but the signal level value is fine), but also a lot about setting up VPN, encryption, handling network switches gracefully - and last but not least: saving power by disabling wireless when not needed.

Also it didn't give me a proper list of networks. It just picked a random one (interestingly not the strongest, actually one I don't see right now...) and never showed the other 5 access points. That doesn't mean of course that NetworkDaemon wouldn't, it's just not in Debian yet, so I didn't try it yet.

Guessnet is a nice tool for detecting your network setup. Using mii-tool it can detect whether my network cable is plugged in, and by doing "ifup eth0 || ifup wlan0" I can bring up whatever is available. Well, almost except that guessnet also fails to detect my wireless networks (it probably would just need to wait a second for the scan to run).

I agree that this is mostly an issue of the wireless driver. But just about every driver has it's own issues, unfortunately. For example, the vanilla orinoco driver doesn't do scanning. The hostap driver doesn't properly power down (right now I'm using some iwpriv hack to disable radio tx to save some power), the ralink driver has been locking up the laptop every now and then... some drivers don't do WEP, others don't to WPA. The wireless keyboard shortcut obviously didn't work either...

So maybe, we right now (once more) need more people working on the drivers.

Oh, and there are more issues with drivers - for example Scorched3D still doesn't work properly on radeon. The OSS nvidia drivers still don't have 3D. Some bluetooth headsets don't work yet... and the closed source drivers are even worse (a pain to install since they aren't properly integrated in the distributions etc.).

So Linux still needs more support by hardware vendors (especially WRT to specs!) as well as more people actually doing the dirty job in C and not just having fun with PHP, Python and Mono.

This Gnomedesktop posting outlines the future of galeon. All it's users (and maybe former users, too) should read it...

Basically: the main (current) galeon authors don't have enough time to work on galeon (e.g. on the bookmarks editor, which has some issues).

Epiphany, which was forked off Galeon, has a much more active developer community, a more up-to-date codebase, including an extension system.

So the galeon authors decided to try to work galeon into epiphany extensions as far as possible (btw, epiphany is to get hierarchical bookmarks independently, so one of the big issues many people have with it is gone then) and maybe make a new Galeon based upon Epiphany to add these features which are not possible with Epiphanys' extension system.

Neither Galeon nor Epiphany currently have an easy standing. For example Ubuntu prefers Firefox to Epiphany (albeit Epiphany is way better intergrated in the desktop). This is a pity, since IMHO firefox suffers from featurits.

Also I'm not a fan of extension systems like in epiphany and firefox. Especially with firefox, the code quality of extensions varies a lot. And even extensions that are really useful (e.g. the webdeveloper toolbar, albeit it offers little more than I do in Galeon with Bookmarklets) still suffer from some old bugs (e.g. the "show divs" menu item will still be checked after you changed the page) that are maybe just not fixeable in the extension.

At the same time, using extensions basically means that the application will be (and behave) different on the machines you work on, unless you spend a lot of time in installing the same extensions everywhere (and then in turn syncing their configurations as well etc.). Neither will the UI be consistent, themes won't support the extensions etc.

Gaim has some nice to read news. Including upcoming SIP/SIMPLE support (from gaim-vv).

But the paragraph I liked most is the following:

"I (Sean) [the main gaim lead devel] have been hired by Google, moved to Seattle, and have been working on the Google Talk team for about a month and a half. [...] Currently, I'm working on making it as easy as possible for other clients to use Google Talk's voice features. You can expect Gaim and other clients to be interoperable with Google Talk's voice features in the near future."

So google is still playing "good guys". At least as long as it's bad for their competitors (Skype, MSN, Yahoo Messenger...)?

I wonder if you can make a PXE (Netboot) image for VMWare player. That would basically give a free VMWare for everyone, wouldn't it? Or at least a kernel which will mount a NFS root.

My @berkeley.edu email is no more; my @sims.berkeley.edu will probably run out in spring - I'll continue to be reacheable using my regular email address as well as my debian.org email.

Today winter term will begin at my university. Meaning I'll be really busy. I'll be doing rather many lectures, and my focus will be to get ready for the exams I plan to take in march...

This is by far my most favourite spam so far...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>404 Not Found</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Not Found</H1>
The requested URL was not found on this server.<P>
<HR>
<ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.31</ADDRESS>
</BODY></HTML>

Whoa, I'm going to buy this stupid product!

But you need to send my this spam more often. Two times (+ those caught by greylisting) is not enough. I need tons of these ads!

Oh, and did I mention this didn't come into my inbox, but into my "spam" folder, too? My filters detect you stupid software, dudes!

Come on. I just don't get why spam works...

Meme time again. Let's ask google what I need...

• erich needs to leave -- true
• Erich needs something to get back into this match -- which match?
• Erich needs suppressing fire -- yeah, I'm so HOT, I need to sppress fire
• Erich needs to strongly reconsider her approach on the beer/lemonade thang -- except that I'm not a 'her', I do drink too much lemonade.
• Erich needs the names, social security numbers, and pay rates of returning and new students currently on Preservation funds. -- ??
• Erich needs to Be a little less self conscious. -- yeah, inconsciousness rules!
• Erich needs someone, too -- yeah, I do.
• erich needs a room/place -- well, not need, but I'd like to have a place inside munich
• Erich needs friends, ex's, maybe a girl for his looove interest. -- "maybe a girl"? oh, I'm pretty sure about that...
• Erich?????Needs a nose, indeed -- uhm, what about the big thing in my face?
• erich needs to get over his feeble little infatuation with jill -- first I need to find out who this jill is
• Erich needs bad spanking. -- no, not exactly...
• Erich needs an assistant to come and help him with this London thing -- uhm, which london thing?
• Erich needs to be fed. -- Well, I'm underweight, so I hear that often.

Yeah, it's been some time since the latest update. I was really busy. Didn't have time to go photo hunting or pick some for my blog.

Yesterday I was at the BuGA 2005, a german gardening show. Which is not like a trade fair or such, more like a large scale gardening art display. All kinds of crazy stuff especially kids seemed to enjoy, together with some nice landscaping and architecture.

This photo turned out surprisingly well. While I was only paying attention to the bumblebee to get a shot before it flies away the background comes out nicely, too.

Gestern war ich auf der BuGA 2005. Etwas eigenartig wars schon, da vor allem ältere Leute und Eltern mit Kindern da waren. Denen hat es aber auch besonders gut gefallen - die Spielplätze waren alle ziemlich gut besucht.

Ich hatte mir mehr "Architektur" gewünscht bei dem ganzen; aber darum geht es ja nicht. Der "Lehranteil" hingegen hat mir nicht wirklich neues erzählt... Ich meine, dass Regenwürmer eine wichtige Rolle für unseren Boden spielen, und bei konventionellem Ackerbau der Boden weniger dieser nützlichen Viecher hat als selbst Ödland - das war nichts neues für mich, und an den meisten Besuchern ging diese Information verloren...

Dieses Bild hier ist überraschend gut geworden: beim Aufnehmen musste ich natürlich schnell sein, bevor die Hummel wegfliegt. Dennoch sind die anderen Blüten im Hintergrund ganz nett geworden.

Flowers and a bumblebee / Blumen mit einer Hummel

Joey pointed out to me that Gnome is "not the world" The reason why I brought up ion as an example is that it targets a very different audience than Gnome. Ion is for people willing to learn lots of keyboard shortcuts and spend a lot of time configuring their stuff. Gnome does the very opposite - it's approach is basically to choose defaults most people will not need to change. Of course it's nice to be able to run Gnome programs outside of Gnome, and KDE programs outside of KDE, but it will still be a Gnome program, and not become an ion program.

Galeon was written for Gnome, and it's goal is not to provide as many features as possible. So if you want that, you are just using the wrong program. Even if it used to have some features you were missing in the alternatives, that just means the alternatives are worse. That there is no (well, there is kazekahase now apparently) web browser designed for the ion audience.

This is almost like if a Gnome user were complaining that lynx doesn't have graphics support! (okay, lynx never had graphics support, galeon 1.2 did have more features)

Although mostly I was annoyed by claims like the Galeon developers ignoring their users. This is a very arrogant claim - the developers should probably know "their users" better than we do. And even if they misjudged the majority of their users - if they decide to write their application the Gnome way, that is their choice. Anyone could have ported Galeon 1.2 as-is to GTK2 if he liked it better. I don't know of such a project, "Galeon for ion users".

I myself am happy with the Gnome direction. Although I did miss some functions when I switched to Gnome2, I quickly noticed that I don't really need them. At the same time, I basically stopped touching any configuration. By now I consider any application where I need to make customizations bad software. Partially because when I look at the amount of time I used to spend on configuring and customizing applications: very few customizations can really make up for that time lost there.

There is space for Gnome panels and for xterms in my desktop life. Most of the time I'm working in my terminals, and X is a mere terminal multiplexer for me. I don't think I could be happy with ion - too many shortcuts to learn for too little gain, and four full-size terminals won't fit onto my screen with it either - Gnome with openbox does the job already really well for me (basically all my apps except the xterms are fullscreen, switchable with my page-left and -right keys of my keyboard). I don't see anything I could gain by switching to ion, actually (why use tabs when I have virtual desktops?).

But every now and then I need to e.g. open a stupid .ppt file. So I would need to remember what the application I could use to open it. Last time I failed miserably with that in the shell: I tried "ooimpress", but I had upgraded to openoffice2. ooimpress2 - no success either. Then I just selected it from my Gnome panel. Sometimes it's more efficient to use Gnome, too.

As a followup to the latest Gnome/Galeon bashings:

I find it ironic that users with very unique needs complain about Galeon (or Gnome) not being written for them. You should consider that a large majority of users do not need the options you so desperately want in the GUI.

And it's not just "people who have never before used a computer". I certainly do not belong to that group, but I am happy with the Gnome approach of keeping setting dialogs small. One of the reasons I don't like KDE is that it's settings dialogs are unuseable. There are tons of options and I never find the one I'm actually looking for, even when I click through all of them.

Claiming this approach is "dictatorship" or "censorship" is hilarious, sorry.

On the one hand you claim that you don't *want* gnome. But then you want Galeon to stay the same old Galeon. How about those people who wrote it (and maybe even a majority of their users) who *do* want to go Gnome?

If you are "ion" users, use a webbrowser written for ion by ion users.

And don't complain about Gnome users writing a webbrowser for Gnome, please.

On the one hand you say that you happen to use galeon only because you thought all other sucked even more, then you complain about them "castrating their old users" - you are maybe just not typical for their users?

They could never satify your needs and their own at the same time anyway.

Followup two on Axel Beckerts trashing of Galeon and Gnome.

Please, never claim again that kazekahase as a good UI. It's sooo stupid.

Just a few examples:

• close tab icon in the toolbar on the very left
• preferences icon in the toolbar (I want to work, not toy around with my preferences!)
• No default keybinding for view source, view source opens in the back
• user level setting is useless, as shown by nautilus. Everone wants to punish himself by seeing all the options he has (and doesn't understand)
• two search fields wasting screen real estate (I already hate the one in firefox up there...
• Default encoding: arabic, autodetection disabled according to prefs.
• Font settings let me choose the arabic fonts first...
• Fixed tab width not using my screen efficiently ("GNOM") is all fitting on the tab label, thats a total waste!
• Key bindings dialog is a PITA. Am I supposed to read all of them? Why would you want to sort them alphabetically?
• Why do I have a "switch proxy" checkbox in the menu when I don't have a proxy?

Oh come on, this is ridiculous.

Btw, we had the "user levels" discussion on the Galeon lists long ago. But e.g. nautilus tried that and it didn't work. So the Galeon developers decided not to repeat that mistake.

You may be right and I noticed again, why I don't want a web browser which is that heavily tied into a desktop environment - But since there was no better browser than Galeon I used it.

Don't tell me that it makes more sense to you to setup stuff like Emacs- vs. windows-style keybindings in every single application you use. That is just stupid, sorry.

On dropping links onto your current window:

I know that, but it's just awkyard that I have to target the tab if I just could move the mouse just a few pixels off al drop the link. Ever thought, why mouse gestures are so efficient? Because you don't have to target anything small, you just use the same move whereever you are. It's just the same here.

I would be so annoyed by this behaviour, because I would accidentially switch pages all the time. No, if I really need to drop a link onto the current tab to bypass this 'target=' value (whoa, that happens all the time, doesn't it?) dropping to the tab label is just fine.

Also I don't like mouse gestures. When they were introduced in Galeon I tried them, but I never got a hang for them. And in general they are not faster in my opinion. They lack interim feedback IMHO. Apart from using the mouse usually is quite slow anyway... I consider mouse gestures to be another big hype.

On extended preferences like in gconf:

Don't tell me that in a blog posting. Tell me that in the Galeon preferences menu!

No! Don't tell people that there are more options. Don't make them waste time by investigating what they could do, just let them use the browser... And those who bother to read the README will discover /usr/share/doc/galeon-common/README.ExtraPrefs.gz

I load about 50 (internal and external) web pages when I log in.

Oh my god. I would DIE if I had to work that way!

Meme time again! (but I'm skipping the pimp name thingy)

The Keys to Your Heart

You are attracted to those who are unbridled, untrammeled, and free. In love, you feel the most alive when your lover is creative and never lets you feel bored. You'd like to your lover to think you are stylish and alluring. You would be forced to break up with someone who was emotional, moody, and difficult to please. Your ideal relationship is lasting. You want a relationship that looks to the future... one you can grow with. Your risk of cheating is 100%. You are not suited for a monogamous relationship. You think of marriage something you've always wanted... though you haven't really thought about it. In this moment, you think of love as something you thirst for. You'll do anything for love, but you won't fall for it easily.

I guess a couple of true stuff in there. E.g. I don't like people addicted to cigarettes. Smokers are not free... and it definitely is true that I don't fall easily. Which makes the 100% risk of cheating interesting, since it's so hard for me to find someone I really like... ;-)

... even when Axel Beckert thinks otherwise.

I've been the maintainer of galeon for quite some time, including the bumpy switch from GTK 1.x to GTK 2.x

There are a couple things to note: Many of the stuff you are complaining about is mostly the old "I need more features" mistake. Features do not increase usability (or as you called it "ergonomy") by sheer quantity. I've seen users get totally confused by the amount of options they have to decide upon. Even I had trouble understanding the exact thing you meant with "a new tab opens at the end of the list instead after the current tab" (since I think my tabs open that way when I click on links...). If you find a way to make these distinctions between "tabs opened by clicking on the new tab icon" and "tabs opened by clicking on links" and the difference in behavious clear for novice users, you would have done a miracle (in ergonomy).

There was so much wrong with Galeon 1.2, and I'm happy to be rid of it.

E.g. I can't agree with your speed complaints. For me galeon 1.3 is a lot faster than galeon 1.2 - there are many situation where galeon 1.2 performs really bad (apart from changes in mozilla). Note that the gtk theme engine has an effect on performance. Choose a lightweight engine and it will be much faster. This applied to GTK 1, too - except that very few people chose a heavyweight engine. So just don't use grandcanyon or similar engines.

Then you are complaining about the focus issues in galeon, which have improved a lot, and are to blame on mozilla embedding. Just because galeon 1.2 uses an anicent mozilla doesn't make them galeon 1.3s fault.

On the missing preferences in the dialog: so what? I never open the preferences dialog anyway. I don't even remember where it is! If you want additional preferences, get gTweakUI. You can enable detacheable menubars (I've never used them), detacheable menus and the old gtk 1 way of changing keybindings by moving the mouse over the menu entry easily (but I think this is available in the normal gnome settings, too).

In the galeon menu of gtweakui you can change the tab location, too. And I bet you are welcome to provide patches if you find anything else missing.

The Ctrl+U behavious works for me exactly as you requested it. Maybe you should choose Emacs-Style keybindings when you want Emacs-style keybindings.

You can drop hyperlinks of a page onto itself. Drop them onto the tab an they will open in the current window.

The search window opens very quickly for me. There are some cases where typeahead-find is indeed annoying (like searching the same term in several pages; with typeahead you have to retype it). For me it's Ctrl+F and start typing. A "search in current page" widget would be so useless... and slow! If I have to type anyway, why should I use my mouse to go to the widget?

As for the tabs menu - I rarely have that many tabs, I could easily do without the tabs menu. Having more tabs than I can see is the point where I need to clean up... (just like having more applications open than desktops)

Oh, and I do want my "empty new tabs" to open at the end of the list. This is much more predictable. I would often be annoyed by your preferred behaviour...

Having *one* network proxy setting for your desktop makes much more sense than having one for each application. You are of course welcome to write a proxy chooser applet if there is none. (Yes, this will affect galeon without a restart). Oh, and you can reach the proxy settings via the gnome menu with two clicks and no waiting for the galeon preferences dialog.

But please stop requesting feature overload for the dialogs. This is an old discussion and has been done with. Sometimes you just have to accept that many people have a different opinion, and maybe adopt to the new situation. Otherwise your applications would still terminate when you press Ctrl+C...

Now for my favourite drawback on your list: "the spinner is no more themeable" (the icons are, just choose a Gnome icon theme...) - oh my god! This is going to kill me.

As probably many Debian users will (since many of the documentation files in /usr/share/doc are automatically compressed), I'd often like to open a .pdf.gz file without having to decompress it first. And I'd actually like to use Gnomes "evince" viewer, since it has a rather lean UI (I hate the xpdf UI).

There is at least one bug in Debian wishing this feature, and at least five bugs reported in upstream bugzilla (which is rather surprising, since bugzilla is barely useable for non-developers; but it also shows how bad the search function of bugzilla is working with all these duplicates!).

Unfortunately, evince upstream is really ignorant about this need...

Basically all the bugs are closed as being "NOTGNOME", just because there is no freaking mimetype defined by freedesktop for compressed PDF files.

Very user friendly, thanks. Just ignore the bugs, maybe they'll go away. I bet noone of the evince people bothered to file a request with freedesktop to add this mime type, did they?

I guess they just don't want to registern in freedesktops bugzilla either. Just like everybody avoids registering (and filing) with theirs.

I'm happy Debian does not use bugzilla; and the recent additions to debbugs should solve many of the things people were missing.

Updates: yes, I am aware that PDF uses compression internally. Still gzip and bzip2 both reduce file size of the beameruserguide.pdf file to around 63% (bzip2 slighty better). Sure, 3 MB approximately system-wide saved by compressing the preinstalled documentation .pdf files is not much. If you transmit them, it does make a difference. So if you want to store them on a memory stick or a floppy disc (you know, these obsolete squares with only 1.4 MB space on them, where the non-gz beameruserguide would not fit onto).

Apparently Gnome developer Christian Neumair picked up the issue now. Thanks!

Update 2: Sorry for mixing two rants. One rant is about the evince people ignoring their users' request because they want freedesktop to do something first. The second rant is a new revival of my Bugzilla is harmful rant.

It boils down to: On a couple of occassions I did either not report a bug or not report a fix, because bugzilla just did not let me do it without registering. That is why bugzilla is bad for your project.