Bug#846002: blends-tasks must not be priority:important (was Re: Bug#846002: Lowering severity)
On 08.12.2016 09:33, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 07, 2016 at 08:59:53AM +0100, Ole Streicher wrote:
>> But it also gives a wrong sign: Debian Pure Blends are by definition
>> integral part of Debian itself. But even now, this is hard to understand
>> for many people -- questions like "what is the difference between Debian
>> Astro and Debian" are quite common, even in front of a poster describing
>> exactly that. With having separate official images for all blends,
>> people would even be more confused. As an example, I would take the
>> Ubuntu approach of having "Ubuntu", "Kubuntu", "Xubuntu" etc. instead of
>> installation options -- people usually think that they have to
>> re-install the system if they want to switch from one flavour to the
>> other. Having similar experience with Debian would be bad for the
>> reputation of the Blends, and for Debian in general.
>
> I don't agree with this argument.
>
> Yes, indeed, in Ubuntu people often don't know that they don't really
> need a reinstall to go from Kubuntu to Xubuntu (or whatever), but is
> that really a problem?
Yes. In the whole 12 years of Ubuntu, they didn't succeed to make clear
that [KXG]Ubuntu is not different from Ubuntu except for the package
selection. I don't know how important it is for them to keep the unity
-- maybe they don't care here much.
But for Debian Pure Blends, it is important to have it clear that the
Pure Blends are just plain ("Pure") Debian. We don't just use the Debian
infrastructure to do something else -- we are an integrated part.
DebianMed and Debian Astro are in no way different from Debian, and if
you have Debian, then you have the Debian Pure Blends as well: it is
just a matter of package selection (and, ofcourse, mainly having the
special packages for our fields available).
And I still think that it would be horrible, if someone wanting to
switch to or from a Pure Blend would feel the need of re-installing.
The argument of wanting more than one blend installed at the same time
(not so rare within interdisciplinary teams) comes on top of that.
> It's certainly *easier* for users to understand that if they want X, Y,
> or Z, they just need to install from the X, Y, or Z image.
So, if they want KDE, they should just need to install a KDE Debian image?
The idea of the Debian Pure Blends is much similar to the idea of the
Desktop environments: There is no "KDE Debian", there is "just" a K
Desktop Environemnt in Debian. Similarly, the is no "Astro-Debian".
There is just a useful environment for astronomers in Debian.
And, having extra images per blend would multiply the number of images
we have to maintain. Instead of 10 official architectures, we would have
10 + 10 * number_of_blends. Possibly again multiplied by the number of
desktop environments, if we apply the same argument to them.
I am not sure that the cdimage team would be happy about this.
> I don't buy that presenting users with a choice of image to download
> "confuses" them, when it in fact *takes away* a very confusing menu from
> the installer.
I would again ask to present some empirical data that adding the Blends
menu is "very confusing". The menu is there since quite a while, and it
was presented to many people, and we usually *do* get a response if
nobody understands the installation process. So, where are the complaints?
After eight months of testing, we can compare the fears here with the
collected experience. And this just doesn't support the fears.
> I think it's going to be obvious to people that if you
> download, say, a Debian Med image, you're going to have a different
> experience than if you download a "plain vanilla" Debian image; and
> that's *certainly* going to make things easier for Debian Med users,
> too.
The experience when installing Debian Astro is just Debian. It only adds
a useful selection of software on top of that, so that you immediately
can start your research, but aside from that everything is as everywhere.
So, the difference here is even less than the difference in experiencing
different desktop environments.
And my experience is that it is easier if people ask about how to
install Debian Astro, I can tell "Just select it in the last step of the
normal installer", instead of "Go to our home page, download a separate
image from there, and install this". It actually makes much difference
if the users can "feel" that they are just inside Debian, and not in a
special distribution.
Best regards
Ole
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