Listing the Paris Metro and the RER separately is cheating a bit, but what the hell… :) I should maybe go back and put them in proper chronological order at some point…
August, 2006
30
Aug 06
Miscymiscmisc.
- I don’t know if it is a good or bad sign that the most satisfactory thing I’ve done in, dunno, ages, is finish reading a day early so that I can have a relaxing evening with a friend from out of town. Good sign: I actually accomplished something! Bad sign: to most of the world, reading 50 or so pages is not really counted as a major accomplishment.
- Dinner was at Brick Lane Curryhouse. Yum yum yum.
- I’ve participated in an irregular dinner club over the past year, and it was great, and I’ll miss it. While I generally hate structure in things like that, Ben Franklin’s regular secret dinner club, The Junto, sounds like it had an interesting structure, and it is hard to argue with the results.
- Interesting and accessible article arguing that the best way to treat terrorists, legally speaking, is to agree that they are …. pirates. Yarrr!
- Jono: totally agreed that Ubuntu’s process is generally quite transparent and an example for others. That said, the profit- what you note as ‘cheap labo[u]r’- is and must be important. Corporations get involved and stay involved because of profit. Corporations that are making money off free software are predictable and reliable (just like corporations that are locked down by licenses); corporations that are doing free software out of the goodness of their heart are not necessarily either predictable nor reliable.
- Fedora is making very interesting noises about music. This is the kind of big thinking the free software desktop needs. (Relatedly, Jamendo sounds cool.)
- I’m still not sure how I feel about Ted’s post about project naming, but it feels significant, and is worth the read.
- Open source needs something like techcrunch.
- Havoc: (1) make it possible to find permalinks in log.ometer.com :) (2) The stopbadware thing is… very complex. The dialogware situation is a real problem, and clearly people read dialogs only a little more than they read EULAs, but some of the other options are unpalatable as well. In particular, ‘As long as the app uninstalls completely and easily from the normal add/remove programs screen, if people think the app sucks they can always get rid of it’ just isn’t sufficient, primarily for two reasons: (1) precious few of the people most impacted by this actually know how to uninstall software, and (2) this presumes that uninstallation undoes all bad things the software has done, which often isn’t the case (for example, it doesn’t take your personal information off remote servers, and it would be impractical to require that.)
29
Aug 06
turns out I’m not completely incompetent after all
We’ve been handed a lot of cases in the past two weeks that I didn’t agree with, because we’ve been watching the evolution of the law, and that means reading lots of things written by people whose worldview is, well, rather Victorian. Literally. But we’ve recently gotten to more recent cases; cases that are presumably still law, and which reflect fairly modern sensibilities. So the leaps of logic are starting to get to me a bit more.
Last night, we had to read a particularly glaring case that I’m pretty sure is still considered relevant precedent in New York State. I spent a lot of time last night reading it, re-reading it, and re-reading it, and just generally Not Getting It. I felt really, really stupid by the end of the night, because clearly there must be something to this opinion. The logic couldn’t have been that faulty. Clearly I was missing something.
Paraphrase of conversation after class with prof: ‘Oh, clearly the judges wanted to make their point, and they were waiting for a good case to make the point with. And so they waited, and instead of a good case, they got this one. So they made it fit. The dissent probably had the better of it, really.’
So maybe my instincts aren’t completely worthless after all. That is good to know.
29
Aug 06
taking on giants and living to tell, and misc. law school thoughts
My buds at stopbadware.org released a report Monday, finding AOL 9.0 to be… well, not perfect. And today it makes the NYT. Good for them.
We wrestled a lot with the notion of language at stopbadware- how to define badness beyond a porn-like ‘know it when I see it‘. Ed__ said it well in one of the comments to my post about law school- there is no ENGLISH99, and it is all downhill from there. :) [For any non-coders reading this, 'C99' is the standard that tells coders exactly what the 'C' language means. No ambiguity, no penumbras, no emanations. Those kinds of things drive coders (all engineers, really) out of their minds. To see an example of what coders have done to give english slightly more reliability, see the RFC on language for RFCs, which specifies what words like 'MUST', 'SHOULD', etc., mean in a technical context.]
Tangentially, the slipperiness of language here at law school has made it clear that this will be more fertile ground for the politicized teaching that I keep hearing a lot about but never seriously saw at Duke. Should be interesting, especially as my own political views have gotten more defined and slightly less mainstream (on either side) since I left Duke.
Met the campus tech law group this evening. Small, but good folks, seemingly. Hopefully I’ll be able to get involved there. No one looked at me too funny when I occasionally let drop that I’m not in it just to make a huge pile of money as a patent lawyer. :)
Updated a wikipedia article about a case the other day, and saw a classmate doing the same today. I’m wondering if there is not enough energy/interest to do something more comprehensive in that direction, perhaps along the lines of Life of a Law Student, but textual. (I find Life of a Law Student’s choice to use audio as the primary format a little odd, given the enhanced searchability and remixability of text. I’ve asked the author, who appears to have done great work in audio, why he chose that- we’ll see :)
27
Aug 06
on blogging in the corporate open source context
One of the more interesting sub-threads spun off by my QA posts of the past week happened in the comments of this post, where I glibly tossed off the comment that ‘I assume that at least some developers blog about what they are thinking about/working on, and if no developer blogs about this Very Big Fuckup, then… that ain’t good. :)’
Since then, Tollef and Mark have each blogged about the problem, about 48-72 hours (depending on how you want to count) after it happened. So a key issue (lack of frank, open commentary on the problem from significant, relevant community members) is resolved in this specific case. Each of the posts are detailed, relevant, honest communications that go a long way towards reassuring me as an Ubuntu user that Canonical takes the problem very seriously and is going to make sure it never happens again. [I will return to the substance of the QA problem involved at some other time; it seems Mark, Tollef and others have a solid grasp on the key issues, so it isn't pressing.]
In this post I’ll turn to the more general question: why do I think paid open source developers should be blogging fairly regularly? What issues are involved?
To start with, open source as a business model only makes sense if your company has an active community which contributes QA, code, sales, or other resources to your company. If you are opening your code without getting contributions back, you have no competitive advantage over a proprietary competitor who has free trial downloads, and likely several disadvantages. Other people who want to grow a community should also do so, of course, but they have no responsibility to do so. Open source companies who aren’t actively investing in creating community are not fulfilling their responsibility to their investors. At this point, Ubuntu/Canonical may be the best example of how to do this, but as last week shows, there are still lessons to be learned by everyone.So… how do you go about creating and fostering community? Basically, you make friends. There are a million ways to do this (being polite in bugzilla, having good mailing lists, etc.) but they mostly boil down to speaking to each other in a human voice. So compare and contrast: official ubuntu problem announce with Tollef’s blog. The official post is good- it speaks to customers, people who aren’t friends and likely won’t be. There is an expectation of a formal tone there. But the community should be composed of your friends, and you communicate with friends differently- you use the tone Mark and Tollef used, ideally in a more timely manner :)
And this is why blogging is so good for open source community development. The mechanism allows for timely delivery of communication- you expect friends to keep in touch regularly, especially when something significant happens that might affect your friendship. The typical style of blogs (and the segmentation from official mechanisms of communication) mean that the tone is usually less formal and more friendly- exactly what you want if you’re trying to create new friends. It is personal, too- it is much easier to make friends with Tollef or Mark than it is with an abstract logo. It is also public, and with comments, can typically be interactive. It is much harder to make new friends if they can’t find you, or if they can’t talk back.
Is blogging perfect, or exclusive? No, of course not- you need a wide variety of tools. But it has quickly become pretty critical, I believe, to creating a functional and healthy and growing community.
Some responses to points from the comments in the last post:
- Obviously blogging takes away from time that could be spent doing other things, like fixing bugs. Valuing blogging is hard- the value isn’t obvious, it is indirect, and it varies from person to person, role to role, and company to company. Good employees and good management identifies things like that, puts a value on them, and tries to do them (or encourages employees to do them) in appropriate levels. This is true of a lot of things, not just blogging- documentation, good bugzilla habits, developing maintainable processes, etc. So if, as a paid open source hacker, you or your management thinks the only valuable thing you do is write code, you’ve likely got bad management. :)
- Relatedly, friendly blogging doesn’t have to take much time. It would have taken about 30 seconds for Mark or someone else to open up a browser, say ‘damn, that sucked; working on it- more details tomorrow’ and hit post, and that would have had a huge impact- way more impact than this verbose, hour-long post will ever have.
- One attempt at justifying Ubuntu’s lag on response was ‘We were in a sprint’- i.e., we were all locked in a room together, working hard. There are of course many ways to interpret this, but here’s one way: ‘we were so busy being cut off from the community that we didn’t have time to stop being cut off from the community.’ As evolution learned the hard way and has spent some time trying to correct, it is more efficient in the short-term to put all the paid people in one place. And it is very, very tempting to do that- you spend less time explaining, less time persuading, more time just doing. Everyone loves JFDI. But long-term, if you start working only with each other, it is very unhealthy for the project. If anything, while in a sprint, Canonical folks should be more sensitive to what is going on outside, and be very careful to not neglect it, else it is very easy to start doing ‘us (Canonical) and them (community)’ instead of ‘us’ (Ubuntu).
- From the same comment: ‘[Blogging] is one of the least efficient ways of talking about things.’ Again, the measurement problem. Are you trying to specifically solve the X problem? Yes, a blog post is a terribly, terribly inefficient way for X developers to talk to each other about how to solve the problem. Face-to-face is undoubtedly the most efficient way to fix the X problem. Are you also trying to build the trust of the community? The number of friends (aka community members) you have? Talking face-to-face, in that case, is completely inefficient- no one knows you did it except the two people involved. Again, you have to find a balance.
Anyway, this has gone on too long so I’ll stop. Bottom line: blogging is a great way to create friends. In open source, friends create better software, albeit usually indirectly. So anyone serious about creating better software needs to figure out how to incorporate good, friendly communication into their workflow. Ubuntu does this way better than most- but still screws it up from time to time, as it did last week, and we should all learn from it.
27
Aug 06
continuing to enjoy New York
It is hard not to enjoy New York. Even if some people swing through New York without saying hello :), there is still plenty to do.
Friday night Krissa and I had a private night, not even a laptop to be found. Since it was Bernstein’s birthday, and we now live on the Upper West Side, we picked up the obvious choice:
We like that the local video store has an editorial point of view. (Read the sticker.)
Saturday afternoon we went to MOMA and saw their awesome dada exhibition. Highlights for me included the famous Duchamp Mona Lisa, the many posters with their re-interpretation of word-as-image-as-nonsense, and Man Ray’s Object To Be Destroyed, which I liked mostly because someone then destroyed it. I left with mixed feelings- Dada is the obvious forerunner of some art I love (Jeff Noon, Negativland, and the Kleptones come immediately to mind) but obviously also the forerunner of lots of really, really terrible performance art. I guess you take with the good with the bad.
Afterwards we went to see Nu Guajiro play in Riverside Park, which as the name implies, is right on the Hudson. There was someone in a GUADEC shirt in the crowd, but they left before I had a chance to go over and say hi.
We followed it up with Cuban-Chinese which (oddly in this day and age) has basically not a drop of fusion in it- there is an (excellent) Cuban menu, and what looked like a pretty good Chinese menu, and a small Peruvian menu, and not much crossover. Still, delicious, and by New York standards, cheap.
I know that as classes get more and more serious I’ll have less time to do this sort of thing, but dammit, I’m doing as much as possible while I can :)
25
Aug 06
Things I’ve learned in law school, part 1 of…well, a lot
Some things I’ve learned in a week or so in law school:
- We (the whole culture, not just lawyers) badly need to figure out a laptop etiquette. One of my professors is strongly anti-laptop, but won’t quite ban them, and another outright bans them. The inconsistency is irritating, and I think it is regressive and damaging, but you know what? It is hard to blame them. Laptops are useful tools that we’ll be using for the rest of our lives, and there are times (like when your prof uses ‘Procrustean’ multiple times) where wireless is a very useful classroom tool. But the downside is pretty big: students IM each other answers to questions (something basically impossible to prevent, short of turning off the network) and they surf the web (even during interactive discussions with really quite excellent lecturers who you’re paying ~$125/hour to hear), both of which are pretty destructive to ‘actual learning’. And it is difficult to hold a conversation with someone when a monitor is between you and them- it is pretty demoralizing as a speaker, in any context, to sit and look at an audience of laptop monitors instead of faces. I think tablets will eventually solve that last problem, but the others will still be there, and we haven’t figured out what the etiquette about them is.
- Fear is a wonderful motivator. I thought tests were bad as an undergrad, but in law school in the US (for those who don’t know) the instruction is ‘Socratic’, which is to say that the professor can ask anyone any question about prior reading at any time, and they expect an answer. So maybe less ‘socratic’ and more ‘interrogation’. It does make just about everyone do the reading every night, which I guess is good, but it also crushes the life out of anyone who learns for the sake of learning. There just isn’t time for that wishy-washy stuff. (In my section, where you’re expected to volunteer to answer questions, no one does- everyone just sits and waits to be called on.)
- I read an opinion by Clarence Thomas yesterday… and I liked it. That was the tremor in the force you may have felt. I’m clearly going to feel an ongoing tension between strict constructionism, textualism, and more activist constructions. A lot of this stems from my practical experience in software. Clearly defined procedures and standards help everyone, and the legal system doesn’t have them. In terms of code compilation (sort of a strained analogy, but bear with me): At what point in the compilation process is it most efficient to check for and fix bugs? Arguably, the US legal system (for a long list of historical reasons) chooses the least efficient step in the legislature->real world process to check for and fix bugs. We often make judges interpret the law, and even in some cases make new law. It is a lot like making your QA or UI people fix problems, not just identify them. (An alternate analogy is that it is like making your compiler not just spit out errors, but also making it fix them, having to guess your intent from the code you’ve written.) That said, the other option is for the legislature to write gigantic, sprawling, human-unreadable law- which may be just as bad a problem if not worse. (Please don’t jump on me in comments for the sweeping generalizations I’ve just made… I know they’re generalizations, on both the law and code side. Constructive comments, or honest questions, totally welcome thought, while I flesh out this analogy of code-checking and testing.)
- Relatedly, I realize that the questions I’m asking in class make me sound like the worst kind of troglodyte conservative. (This morning I asked about cost-benefit analysis in a law which was trying to prevent people from drowning- ‘but the law says only boats with more than 50 people in them have to be seaworthy!’) Maybe I’ll be the founder of the politically liberal school of strict constructionists. :)
- As the son of a doctor, I’ve been raised on the idea that we’re in an over-litigious society, where people too often refuse to take responsibility for their own actions. While I still think that is to a great extent true, it is hard to read any substantial amount of product liability law cases before realizing that increased litigiousness has done a great deal for our society. Had a case today where a woman had stones in her bean soup, and then another where a woman had tacks in her blueberry pie. And then you realize the two cases were against the same restaurant- and in fact they had gone to dinner together! Threatening to sue the hell out of people has made a lot of irresponsible organizations more responsible, and in the process saved a lot of lives and a lot of pain. That is very easy to forget when we live in the safe, coddled society which that litigation has created. Is the current balance correct? Almost definitely not. But it would be very easy to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction as well. (Beware, I may come out of this advocating liability for software.)
- It turns out that just like there are beautiful or elegant hacks, so there are also beautiful and elegant rulings. I just got the privilege of reading my first one (MacPherson v. Buick) and the feeling was distinctly similar to the feeling of hearing about a great hack- if you understand the context, you can appreciate all the work and twists and turns that go into each of them, and just sit in awe at the beauty of it for a little while. Then you try to figure out how to do it yourself :) Pirsig’s Quality is everywhere, if you know how to look for it, it turns out.
- Lawyers proudly have their own language- a lot like English, but not quite. (Geeks are no better, of course, but our language can be safely ignored by most people.) Of course, every profession does, because you have to balance the tension between higher efficiency in information transmission and incomprehensibility to the rest of the world. My sense so far is that the legal language is tradition-bound and crufty, and kept with unreasonably tenacity. But I’m not sure how one really changes such things- any linguists care to point me at good resources on the evolution of professional language, and how to kick-start fixing it? :)
- If you’ve met bitter lawyers, bitterness is to be expected :) The entire legal educational process is designed to break you. This course is pass-fail, it is with a very nice prof, and it is still one of the most brutal educational experiences I’ve ever had. I am terrified of A-F grading in a class with a non-forgiving prof.
- On the first day of orientation, they tell you all about how the legal profession is very, very team-oriented and sociable, and that you’ll have to learn how to work with others. TAfter orientation, they grade you on nothing but individual achievements under incredibly bizarre circumstances, with all preparation under strict instructions not to copy even case outlines from each other, and then they hire you based on nothing but those grades. So no surprise that despite all the talk about it being a sociable field, it is full of psychopaths :) Not that I see an easy way to grade group work in this context- but it seems like something every law school should be pushing for and experimenting with. I wonder if change-tracking in collaboratively written documents could be one way to tackle that.
- I potentially have a lot to learn, even about blogging, now that I’m (apparently) a blawger. (I’m not kidding, that is what the blogging lawyers call themselves.) Three Years of Hell (a just-graduated Columbia student) blogs about blogging as a first-year- look forward to his second entry on it.
24
Aug 06
More on QA, Ubuntu, trust, etc.
Heard from Ubuntu this morning (in comments and via email, neither official) so I figured I owed an update, having slammed them fairly thoroughly here :) So some notes from email and comments:
- I didn’t see an official Ubuntu announce about this because I didn’t look in the most obvious place of all- ubuntu.com. Looking there points you to this message, with more details in a subsequent linked page. Good on Ubuntu for discussing the issue in the most highly visible place they can, and promising (albeit all the way at the bottom of the second page) that they are investigating the problem. Given that one of the most valuable things any distro has (especially Ubuntu) is the trust of its users, I would probably have given the ‘we are researching the problem’ statement much more prominence, but it is there, at least.
- To be very clear: I don’t expect Ubuntu to have researched the cause of the procedural problem and fixed it in 48 hours. That would be nice but unreasonable. I just expect them to very publicly say what they are doing about the problem, in terms of research, etc.
- To also be clear: I’m surprised I’ve seen nothing on planet ubuntu (not planet gnome), because I assume that at least some developers blog about what they are thinking about/working on, and if no developer blogs about this Very Big Fuckup, then… that ain’t good :)
- The negatives: apparently the problem was there for 17 hours. Not a good sign, but again, that is partially because I have high standards for Ubuntu.
- Apparently the reason I didn’t know about dapper-proposed is that it isn’t fully deployed yet. That is mixed news, I guess- good that there is a reason I didn’t know about it; bad that something like dapper-proposed was not fully tested and in place before the LTS release. (Note here that again I’m holding Ubuntu to a very high standard; as far as I know no other distro has such a queue for their long-term distros yet either. Of course, every distro should. If I’m wrong, and other distros do have it, I’d love to know- please let me know in comments.)
- James: I’ve not considered an LWN article on distro QA because for quite some time (really since around when I left Novell) I’ve been pondering writing the definitive serious white paper on the subject. As dobey is about to find out, writing anything of that length is hard :) We’ll see if these blog posts coalesce my thinking enough to get something LWN-length out, though.
- error27, others who have discussed enterprise distros: Enterprise distros have substantial resources directed at identifying stable upstream versions, and stabilizing them even more. So of course we should expect that at this point enterprise distros are very stable; more so than their more bleeding-edge community counterparts. However, traditional enterprise distros can only be resourced from within the company that produces them, and their users are explicitly paying not to worry about it- the payment is mostly in lieu of other forms of contribution. In contrast, a community distro like Fedora or Ubuntu should be virtually unlimited in terms of the amount of testing, feedback, triage, etc., that it receives from community members. Given that, if coordination and communication problems are solved, community distros should be of at least equal quality to enterprise distros. (It should be of no surprise, given that coordination/communication problems are perhaps the biggest stumbling block to this, that I think everyone needs a bugmaster.)
- Go read the comments in last night’s post for more comments on the Edgy/Unstable differences. They are all dead on; no need for me to repeat them, except to say that obviously there are a lot of various layers to the disparity. Still, the basic question stands: how do you get more people onto unstable, and get them contributing?
I swear I’ll write something about law school soon :)
23
Aug 06
Notes about distros, QA, etc.
Yesterday I flamed Ubuntu, I think with cause, for breaking X. Followups:
Points out of the comments in that thread yesterday:
- Fedora now believes that they are going to be able to support (apparently already have supported) distro->distro upgrades, like Debian has done for years and Ubuntu has done since day 1. This is very big for Fedora. Along with a growing selection of packages in Extras, two of Debian/Ubuntu’s biggest selling points to the technical community are under siege. Yay for competition :)
- One of the Fedora dudes clarified my understanding of the FC5/X7.1 situation- it was not nearly as broken as I’d thought. That said, part of what Fedora should be trying to do is build a culture around QA and quality- which means clear messaging about these sorts of things. So I’m glad that they were doing the right things for roughly the right reasons, but they need to get better about communicating those so that their culture grows up with them.
- rpath points out that the obvious solution to problems like the one I had yesterday is to be able to rollback packages, and that conary (rpath’s system management tool) can do that. I continue to think that rpath is doing really interesting stuff; this would be one good demo of why. (Yes, I know red carpet and other tools have done rollback for a while, but conary’s implementation, from what I can grok of it, is nice and well-integrated.)
- Lucas did a really interesting (and totally unscientific) ‘survey’ of Ubuntu and Debian users by way of CTCP in IRC, and discovered that something like 4% of Ubuntu users were using edgy, while 76% of Debian users were using unstable. My hunch is that this says more about Ubuntu’s incredible success in getting newbies into #ubuntu than it does anything else, but the core question (‘what percentage of our users are using and testing our development branch? what steps are we taking to raise that percentage?’) is a really interesting one which every free software project should ask itself. (NB that GNOME is failing here, and has been since Ximian stopped funding packaging of unstable builds years ago. Ubuntu’s unstable builds have been a huge pickup in that respect.)
- Shockingly, no real response from Ubuntu that I can see anywhere (planet, bugsquad list, forums), other than the fast fix. Remember that much of this is about expectations- I expect a lot from Ubuntu, so when they fuck up, (1) I get very very pissed, because I trusted them and (2) I expect openness about why it happened this time and how they are going to prevent it from happening next time, so that I can again trust them.
Some things I personally should have explained better:
- I am not switching distros. All things considered, at this time Ubuntu still offers the best mix of maintainability and support for my needs, especially now that I know not to actually trust their support packages. Silly and naive of me to have done so earlier, though, and led to (frankly) great anger.
- QA for this sort of thing (big, big bug in package everyone uses) is not really very hard to do. Ubuntu has been leading the way for quite some time in open source distro QA implementation, pushing packages early and quickly in their unstable branch so that their stable release is both well tested and fairly up-to-date- exactly what every other distro should be doing, and some do to various degrees. But Ubuntu have not quite pushed hard on the last mile for stable- getting users to test proposed updates before they ship. I only discovered yesterday that they have a ‘proposed updates’ channel for apt. Quite simply, if I (who am completely obsessive about open source QA) don’t know about your proposed updates channel, you haven’t pimped it enough. Every distro should have a proposed updates channel, like Ubuntu does, and pimp it heavily to their skilled users, which AFAICT Ubuntu does not. Skilled users who are not running unstable should, in response, consider it nearly a moral obligation to use the proposed updates channel on any non-mission-critical boxes. That combo, used effectively, should have caught this before it went out. If Ubuntu is post-morteming this (which they should be) that would be the big question to ask- why did the community not catch this for us?
- It is worth remembering that every significant community linux distro has a community of thousands who will gladly test anything you throw at them, so distros must actively encourage and take advantage of that. Any distro which doesn’t (and many don’t) is throwing away free time and free money. (Relatedly, I firmly believe that as a result of the opportunity for free QA, most open distros should in practice be more stable than their ‘enterprise’ alternatives, which have smaller user bases who would rather pay for someone else to do the work. That in practice enterprise distros tend to be more stable points to inefficiencies in how open distro QA is done, IMHO, not just the obvious points about business models.)
22
Aug 06
!@#@!#@!- still learning what ‘long term support’ means
Things that are not good:
- put all your class notes in something X-based
- see an X update from Ubuntu before you go to class
- decide not to install the X update, because, hey, you wouldn’t want a broken X right before class
- read some email, have breakfast
- remember you’re running not just any distro, but hey, the ‘Long Term Support’ distro- the one that presumably has, you know, a QA process. And no one would put out a package that breaks X in their Long Term Support, enterprise-ready distro, right?
- install the upgrade
- turn off the computer
- go to class
- turn on the computer
- discover that you have no X, and class started two minutes ago.
Furious would not begin to describe how I felt. The internal dialog in my head was ‘!@!@#@!#. What actually well-supported distro can I switch to?’ because lets be clear- I’m running a stable distro for the first time in ages specifically to avoid shit like this. If the ‘stable’ distro still breaks my fucking X, it isn’t stable. Period. End of discussion. So I need another distro.
To ubuntu’s credit, there was an update in apt within a few minutes of when I got to class, so I was able to fix it by apt-get’ing again. But if your QA process for the Long Term Support distro let through an X update that broke X, well, your QA process still needs some work. (I understand that given the vast diversity of hardware X runs on, it isn’t possible to do perfect QA, but if it breaks a lot of machines, which it did, something went deeply wrong in your process.)
Side note: Abi’s XML is pretty noisy when you’re using outline mode. Turns out emacs + abi xml was not quite the savior I would have hoped it would be in my initial, paniced moments.