Re: Future of Debian uncertain?
#include <hallo.h>
* John Goerzen [Wed, Feb 26 2003, 12:34:18PM]:
> > Are you doing something about it or not?
>
> There is the Debian desktop subproject. I do not know what exactly their
> status is. People are working on the installer. Again, I do not know what
> their status is.
That is the problem. Noone knows exactly about the status because it
was a nice dream but it is dying. Reason? Manpower and more motivation
of ALL MAINTAINERS to support the idea and help implementing it.
Thinking: "oh, fine, that guys want make stuff easy for newbies, let them
do" makes the whole thing inpossible. Lots of manpower is needed to
maintain the packages in the current good state. Even more manpower and
experience of partciular package maintainers is needed to analyze the
problems of newbies and make the packages more useable for them. Who is
ready to bring this, to do this work? Most maintainers are happy if
their packages work for them somehow, are installable and lintian-clean.
And finaly, we are volunteers. Coding for newbies is not fun. Analyzing
their problems is not fun. Even developing concepts for "more
useability" (aka idiot-proof software) is not fun when it comes to
details. What do you expect?
There are so many permutations, so many combinations of software parts,
it is easy to dump some preconfigured piece of software onto someones
harddisk as many distributions do, it is much, much more complicated to
have package number of factor 10.
Last week I met someone on IRC who tried to tell me that with some
commercial human ressources and commercial (but with public output)
interessts, it would be easy to reform Debian. I doubt.
> > I don't see why you can't have the first two options in unstable, after
> > all is unstable, isn't it?
>
> In general, we do, I think.
Stop making illusions about having all, really all great new software
but working on Stable ground and having smooth upgrade paths in the
future and really no hidden/overseen/cross-depending problems. It is not
possible. Unstable is detached from Stable for a good reason (and
currently there are no mental locks forcing to synchronise on Testing,
fortunately). And after all, Debian's infrastructure is not very good
prepared for such things.
It is possible to create something like Stable plus Upgrade series, but
someone has to do this. And who is going to? Users? Not really. Average
developers? Not really, at least not with some study of internals. And
developers can work fine with Unstable. Yes, this is some problem with
this mentality and the social contract, but that is how the things work.
Clueless users have to use Stable, without poisoning their systems with some
cewl special upgrade packages or so. That is where they should
(theoreticaly) get no problems.
Gruss/Regards,
Eduard.
--
Klar, Pizza ist immer gesund :) Glaube ich... Hoffe ich :)
-- Jens Hoffrichter
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