Never mind, that was user error.

Does AU have any redeeming features whatsoever?

@terdon I also saw that answer now that I think about it. I'm not sure how I managed to forget about it, since it's useful information. Thanks

@MichaelHomer A nice color scheme?

And yes, it does. There are some very knowledgeable people there, and it's a great place to ask Ubuntu questions. Ubuntu does various things differently and has its own toolset and those are best asked there.

It's also a much more GUI-oriented community so that's also a good thing for them.

It's not a good place for in-depth *nix stuff but a great place for user-level questions. Ubuntu has a far greater proportion of non-expert users and they get the help they need on AU.

@MichaelHomer It's more user-oriented than U&L. For whatever reason.

@FaheemMitha Well, notoriously Ubuntu it's the OS of choice of switchers. Many questions there are from newbies asking implicitly or explicitly how to replicate Windows / Mac features, but anyway Ubuntu isn't really designed for production (beside the server version) so it somehow makes sense for Ask Ubuntu to be more user-oriented.

@kos Switchers from what? Windows?

@FaheemMitha From whatever is non-*nix, i.e. the vast majority (almost totality?) from Windows / Mac OS (I myself started using Ubuntu after having used both Windows and Mac OS).

@kos Ok.

*Mac OS is Unix actually. Forget about that, I meant more from whatever is more mainstream.

@kos True, but it doesn't particularly look or feel like traditional/standard Unix.

@FaheemMitha Indeed. Hence my error :) however it had a cool thing to download / compile Unix tools on the fly, which made installing Unix tools really easy. Can't remember the name at the very moment.

@kos MacOS is not *nix, OSX is.

@terdon My bad, I meant Mac OS X. Who's talking about Mac OS <= 9 anymore anyway. :)

Woah, @kos, why would you want an arch.se?

Oh man, I really really hope that proposal fails.

The last thing we need is yet another site with overlapping scope.

It's bad enough that we have AU.

At least AU has the beneficial side effect of attracting the clueless Ubuntu users. I can't imagine why anyone would want to split arch off of U&L.

@terdon Probably. I still don't have a definitive stance on that proposal. Of course I'll opt out if I decide it's better to not have it.

To be honest, I liked the idea at first.

@kos Why?

@terdon Mostly because of this:

But that's just it, Arch really isn't peculiar. It's a classic Linux.

I can sorta see a point to AU since the average Ubuntu user really is quite different from your average Linux user, but splitting off Arch seems pointless. It's a fringe distro used by a small number of, generally quite knowledgeable users.

^^ meant this

That's just a package manager.

Everything else is bog standard on Arch.

We can't start breaking up a new site for every distro. We'll end up with dozens of tiny sites, all of whose scope is overlapping, and none of which is likely to have enough of a community to make it work.

@terdon Perhaps, I agree with that. That's why I wanted to see the numbers first.

However again, I'm not necessarily favorable to it. I could see a point in having a separate site for the reason explained above, that's why I followed and promoted the proposal. If people want it and are willing to work on it, I'll probably also agree with it happening.

Dunno. I really dislike breaking up SE like this. It just results in fewer people actually seeing a question and more cross-site duplicates.

Yeah, I agree. There must be a big community supporting the specific site (like AU), or it doesn't make sense. In fact, in my eyes, the Arch proposal may not be doing too well in those terms already.

@terdon I could get behind a Kali site.

If AU is really against bug workarounds, that's weird.

@FaheemMitha Well OK, that's an exception. So could I. As long as it's a long, long way behind.

@FaheemMitha They're against "bugs". Their stance is that bugs should be reported to the Ubuntu devs and they can't do anything about them. It's silly but there you go.

@terdon So workarounds don't exist, apparently. One should just accept the bugs?

No, one should report them to launchpad. That's the idea.

2nd close reason there

@terdon I've seen Launchpad bugs. Usually they just get ignored.

@FaheemMitha Oh come on. That really isn't true and how would you know? Presumably, the ones you've seen are the ones that are still around: classic confirmation bias. Plus, you don't use Ubuntu, so you wouldn't see the fixes.

@terdon I look at lots of Ubuntu bugs. Often unrelated to my immediate issues. In the process of googling around.

I don't think I've seen a single one with a proper analysis and fix. Sometimes they just seem to close it.

Yes, I have a confirmation bias. It's about Ubuntu. :-)

Note that Ubuntu is just one of the many projects hosted on launchpad.

@terdon Yes, I'm aware. I was talking about the Ubuntu ones; sorry for my imprecision.

Actually, the only project I can think of offhand that uses Launchpad that I also use is qbittorrent.

MySQL

@terdon Oh, really? Isn't that owned by Oracle now?

Also Inkscape and Terminator for me.

@FaheemMitha Dunno, but that wouldn't mean they can't use launchpad.

@terdon Ok. Don't use either of those.

> There are 38353 projects registered in Launchpad. 11743 have bugs reported, 2373 have translations, 24829 have Bazaar branches, 5426 have blueprints, and 4344 have questions & answers.

@terdon True, but I would assume they use their own hosting.

Aren't you thinking of SQL?

Then again, MS is using Github now. It's a strange world.

MySQL is FOSS

@terdon Huh?

SQL is not.

@terdon You've lost me. SQL is a language.

Oh. My bad, I thought it was what MySQL was a free version of.

@terdon Do you migrate a lot of U&L questions to AU?

Anyway, yes, MySQL's parent company seems to be owned by oracle: MySQL was owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now owned by Oracle Corporation.

@FaheemMitha Not really.

@terdon Oh. Ok.

What about the other way?

You can see the stats in the >10k tools/.

unix.stackexchange.com/tools/posts/migrated/stats

@terdon Oh, I didn't realise I had access to those.

@terdon MySQL is a RDBMS. SQL is a language that, as far as I know, runs on some (most? all?) RDBMS's.

But I don't really know much about databases.

Yeah, just read that.

The people on dba SE do, though.

Well, dinner time.

@terdon No answer to my cron/systemd question. What informal information I'm getting is decidedly mixed. Nothing seems to polarize people like systemd. For whatever reason.

any ideas how I can make the space evaluate properly in OS X?

Quote it or escape it.

"smb://cofarmer:[email protected]/Shared/Information Technology1/Interoperability" or smb://cofarmer:[email protected]/Shared/Information\ Technology1/Interoperability

the ! in my password is the last character... so as you can see, it treated the first part as part of the mount_smbfs command, then split on the "!" to the space

so how would I get it to not split my password up in a wierd way

I take it back, I'm still getting the same error when I remove that part of my password anyway. By removing that portion of the password I was hoping for an authentication failed error. But I'm still getting the URL parsing failed error described before

@sadmicrowave Single quote it then.

could you demonstrate?

@sadmicrowave 'foo' instead of "foo"

Better yet, post a question on the site explaining exactly what you're doing, whether this is a command issued on the terminal or via /etc/fstab or some other method.

nvm, this is the one that did it for me: hintspace.blogspot.com/2014/02/connecting-to-smb-share.html

replacing the space in the server path with "%20"

Or anyone else, for that matter.

Otherwise, I'll just send the patch to Debian.

sigh Yesterday, I spent 2 minutes writing an answer. Today it has >70 upvotes and 0 downvotes. And yet, until I edited it a few minutes ago (because someone pointed out the problem), it was wrong.

Voting is really unreliable, even for technical, verifiable topics.

@Gilles Congratulations, in any case. Link?

@FaheemMitha easy to find on my profile if you really care

@Gilles Yes, I'm sure it is.