Re: Galloping featurism is not the problem
Daniel Quinlan <quinlan@pathname.com> writes:
>> I'm beginning to believe that Debian may never be a stable system.
Bruce Perens <bruce@pixar.com> writes:
> Please define what form of stability is desirable.
Debian is composed of many moving targets. It would help if there was
less use of beta test or alpha test software in packages. Some
packages follow the latest beta; I'm not sure that's a good idea.
There have also been some good suggestions by other people.
> Does stability imply significantly more management of the package
> maintainers? Would defining a restricted subset of Debian with an
> enhanced support organization satisfy a need for stability?
No, it doesn't. I'll try to come back with a suggestion that might
help.
> [...]
> I wish you'd take one of these areas and work on it, rather than
> attempting to find some way to fix bugs _by_improving_our_policies_.
I'd be quite happy if the policies were frozen right now. Most
problems can be handled by discussion rather than more policy.
> [...]
> If I had the power to tell _you_ what to do, I'd send you off into a
> corner to work on a more naive-user-friendly "dselect". We could get
> more done by improving that than we could by arguing policy on
> debian-devel.
I think Debian could have a better "dselect" for both newbies and
hackers. Package configuration and selection needs to happen at the
same time, a file needs to store the default configuration and
selection so that installs can be automated and defaults can be
changed without changing (or reading) the actual package. All of this
would require some things to be redesigned. This would wait until
Debian 1.3, obviously. I need to think about this some more, but I
think I could help make something better.
In addition, Christoph's permissions configuration could be added into
the configuration file. I would hesitate to add it until then, except
as a separate package.
Dan
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