I want to apologize to both the Vector Linux community and to Béranger. This whole mess started when I confused the author of Planète Béranger with a Red Hat consultant named Daniel Béranger. Both are Linux professionals working in Europe and both are extremely sharp. I removed the offending post and apologized to Béranger and that SHOULD have been the end of it. Clearly it wasn't and tomh must have had some interesting comments which I missed. He now has thought better of them and deleted them which, based on some reactions, was probably a wise thing to do.
It looks to me like things got out of hand on both sides. The Planète Béranger blog is subtitled "strong and cynical opinions" so you need to take "Distro Hating Week" with that in mind. It was, in essence, a rant. Based on the release of Mandriva 2009 it is VERY EASY to see where Béranger is coming from. For those of you who haven't looked at the latest Mandriva it is a bloody awful buggy disaster of a release.
We also have to face the fact that for a solid year things just sat in testing for about forever and rarely if ever got moved into patches or extra. The complaint about Vector Linux he makes was very valid for way too long. When I volunteered to do a little repo work both JohnB316 and Vector made a point of writing me personally and asking me to fix that ASAP, which I've done to the best of my ability. (The VL 5.8 repo still needs some work, BTW.) My point is that the Vector developers saw and recognized the exact same issue that Béranger raised on his blog and wanted it fixed.
One of the things that drew me to the VL community is that the developers and senior community members have always been tolerant of constructive criticism and don't generally circle the wagons and get all defensive. They take a much more positive approach and try to address the issues raised. That's why I volunteer.
Béranger is not known for being diplomatic and he was clearly upset at the case of mistaken identity. That was entirely my fault. I acknowledge that and I did apologize for it. While I never saw Tom's posts it seems to me like there was a whole lot of overreaction on both sides after that. Not good. Driving Béranger, a prominent Linux blogger with a large readership, away from this distro is a huge mistake. He has Planète Béranger. Let's not turn the VL forum into Planète Déranger, OK? Keeping responses civil is always the preferred way of dealing with what was originally an honest mistake on my part that got blown way out of proportion.
Oh, and Vector, Romanian is a romance language written with Latin glyphs. Everything we need for Romanian localization is already in place or in the works. If we use gdm instead of kdm to allow easy switching of languages and add a keyboard switching utility that actually changes xorg.conf similar to the one in Wolvix we're home free.
Respectfully,
Caitlyn
