Re: Idea for the burner
On Thu, 6 Mar 1997, Chad Zimmerman wrote:
> .. You go to any book store you see 7 or 8
> books that deal with slackware and redhat, why not Debian?
Maybe because debian isn't known widely enough. Maybe that is because too
many books don't mention it at all. The Infomagic booklet in the cd-set I
installed from doesn't for instance.
I heard about debian and what it is because I asked an apparent guru on
irc about the slackware bugs (glad I didn't ask this sort of question when
1.2 was just out..) I chose debian because of all the volunteers working
on it, as volunteers, which is one of the reasons I wanted to play with
linux anyway, I like that state of mind.
Now, if I hadn't already had net access and if I hadn't asked "which" to a
guru I would probably not have found my way to debian. That is really bad
because IMHO debian is _naturally_ the best linux, besides being GNU as
well.
Debian needs good publicity. The RC5 thing should be on behalf
debian.org. Better still, lets have packages for it and show that off to
the other linuxers. Why would they want to complain about that? Let them
join debian if linux is their concern.
> If/when I do start on this, it won't be untill the fall probably... have
> another book project I am finishing up.
One of the great things in debian is that it moves really fast. That is
however not so great for book publishers. If you had written the book now,
you'd probably have to rewrite it by fall anyway.
For debian it would be a good thing if the general documentation
procedures were better organised. Most packages seem to have quite good
documentation, its just hard to know where to get started. It would be
tops if the coherency of the packaging system could be imposed on the
documentation.
Like, dselect is a great and easy tool, but there is no manpage for it...
That is a BUG, people. I have spelled the dpkg manual to get a hunch
of what is going on in dselect and I got used to dpkg. So, apart from the
first time at installation, I never use dselect anymore. I guess that was
not the intention of dselect's developers. Why isn't there a
dselect-HOWTO? (Maybe I should try writing that then instead of this :-)
Like, a couple of days ago I just read about the menu package on this
list. I bet I am not the only one who didn't have a clue about even the
existance of it. Yet, from what I've read it is a wonderful package,
integrating other packages the way the debian system can do so fine. The
way a structured documentation should be (and I believe most building blocks
for something like it are already there.)
Also, I think it would be better to drop info (sorry, you die-hards GNUdes
out there.) Lets have all the info stuff as lynx-enabled HTML, it provides
all the info functionality and any dummy can view it with his browser,
even before having linux really working. A much better bet in the long run
I estimate. It could also be merged along with configuration scripts
(java?) - another fine point of debian by the way - into the dselect
front-end.
Oh well, it's becoming another "dselect musing" again. Not the right place
for it on debian-user.
Anyway, for what it's worth: I heard rumors (but just that) of "Running
Linux" being rewritten to include info on debian. All I know for sure is
that others mentioned this as rumor.
Cheers,
Joost
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