[conspire] upgrade and grub

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Paul Zander (paulz at ieee.org):

> In a totally unrelated email group, someone made a posting denouncing
> the way people use 3 dots.  She was apparently unaware that it has
> been used for centuries and even had a name:  ellipsis from the Greek
> word for omission. 

Which also provides the hoity-toity English words 'elision' (n.) and
'elide' (v.).

FWIW, I still have something of a US-ASCII bias, despite having long ago
made my peace with UTF-8, which after all permits me to write 'Det
finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlige klær'[1], I still do elipses using
three full-stop (American English: 'period') characters, rather than
using the oh-so-cute UTF-8 or MS-Windows single-character alternatives.

> lxmed is only used to edit the lx menus.  Much better than using one
> favorite text editor to hack the files.  

False dilemma.  

If you install SeaMonkey using a Debian package (which doesn't currently
exist[1]) or a Debian-compatible external-repo package (which does), you
can confidently expect a pop-up menu entry to automagically get created
on both LXDE and all/any other window managers or DEs instlaled using
Debian-family packages -- for the simple reason that there is a
base-level expection that all such packages will register themselves
with the Debian menu-management facility.

> Seamonkey,  Based totally on wishful thinking, I was confident that
> changes to debian libraries that effect Firefox will most likely also
> associated to Seamonkey.  I would hope that the Mozilla people have
> some common code between the two projects.

Possible, but not in any way assured -- because the Debian
package-management system knows nothing about your SeaMonkey
installation.

If you want to be amazed, run 'ldd' (list dynamic dependencies) against
the main SeaMonkey binary file (if you can find the latter).  I'll bet
there are at least a couple of _dozen_ dynamic-linker dependencies on
libraries.  And, if any of those goes away because the Debian
package-management system thinks nothing requires them any more,
probably SeaMonkey will mysteriously break.

> Just the same, it will easier to keep seamonkey up to date by adding
> the repository to my sources.list.   

Not intending to rain on your parade, but that's not enough.  You really
ought to remove the current, non-packages files comprising SeaMonkey.

As I've already said, I predict that those got installed to various
subdirectories of /usr/local, which is a special locally-administered
tree not the main system tree.  Do you know what files they are?  No,
almost certainly not.  Is there any piece of system software that can
find and remove them?  Nope.  Can you read the installation scripts
and/or Makefiles of the SeaMonkey tarball to figure it out?  Maybe, but
you probably won't.  So, you basically put an effectively-untracked file
stew into multiple subdirectories of (probably) /usr/local.  Are those
harmless?  Maybe, maybe not.  I wouldn't want that stuff just sitting
around, potentially causing mischief -- but now, you do.

You should at least (please) learn the lesson that the above is part of
the cost of following other people's bad advice to resort to 'upstream'
tarballs (either source or binary), rather than packaged software.
That's really my larger point -- to learn from this experience and not
blithely use upstream tarballs without looking for better alternatives.




> I primarily use seamonkey as HTML editor.

Sure.  This was, in origin, one of the codebases in the Netscape
Communicator suite.  Back then, it was called 'Netscape Composer'
(later 'Mozilla Composer', until Mozilla, Inc. dropped the suite
concept).

I will point out standalone programs derived from it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KompoZer   (orphaned)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvu  (likewise)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueGriffon  (actively maintained
     successor, inspired by Nvu, but rewritten)

Long ago, I lost track of WYSYWIG HTML editors.  Once upon a time, I
vaguely approved of Bluefish and Quanta (which subsequently became
'Quanta Gold'.  This tries to be current:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML_editors


> It is also a kind of handy when be able to open the same files with
> Firefox and verify that I have actually saved the changes ...

Honestly, I stopped being interested in WYSIWYG HTML editor programs,
even in theory, when I found it met 100% of my needs to edit the 
HTML using vi, and occasionally save and then reload the file in a Web
browser running on the same machine.  Who the Gehenna needs the HTML
editor to be _graphical_?  That's what the Web browser is for.  
If the change is in error, you revert a few changes in your text editor,
and try again.

But, if WYSIWYG HTML editors are your cuppa, there are many others
beyond the one in SeaMonkey.

> I'm trying to start at the beginning with how to design parts.  openscad has been in previous debian releases.  It is still in stable, but not in testing.  

As I said before, given that you're now on Debian-stable, why does it
matter to you that it's currently broken on Debian-testing?

> http://www.openscad.org/downloads.html Has two suggestions.

Wait, aren't you running off half-cocked again?  What problem are you
trying to solve?

I will remind you, once again, that you ought to be careful what
amendments you make to sources.list.  In particular, be wary of bad
advice that sometimes emerges from upsteam developers.  



[1] Sometimes, if not always, the reason no Debian package exists is
that it's just not a good idea in the first place, so be aware of that
possibility.  I would argue that such is the case with SeaMonkey.