Debian target audience
Hello all.
Some time ago there was a posting on the list stating that typical Debian
user is of SysAdmin type. The guy received a lot of negative responses and
as a result we have now dotfile-generator in the distribution as our
statement of being friendly to novices. Good thing, but what is Debian
target audience anyway?
Let's get serious, office worker would rather go with Caldera (if Linux at
all), ISP - with FreeBSD, newbie - with RedHat, etc. Debian is the effort
of a large number of developers and primararily *for* developers. No, we
don't forget newbies (dotfile-generator), office workers (Freedom
Desktop), ISPs (ongoing MTA discussions) but we DID forget dvelopers. Here
is why:
1) Every developer using commercially available libraries is forced to
stay with libc5 developmental tree for a while.
2) Every developer (even one NOT using commercial products) is interested
in having recent versions of the freely available libraries.
3) Every user (including developers) is interested in having recent
versions of freely available applications (editors, debuggers, viewers,
etc.)
4) It is preferable for everyone to have only one runtime library (either
libc5 or libc6). Having applications using both does eat up memory and
slow down system. (that's why we are having deadlines for converting
libc5 packages in hamm )
5) In the situation with libc5 -> libc6 transfer developer stuck
with libc5 will not be available to enjoy goddies from the 2)!!!, 3) and
4) because all new software will be compiled against libc6.
I hope you agree that situation is not acceptable. My proposition, which I
already stated, is to have in addition to "stable" and "unstable"
something called "unsupported" where would all newly available packages
(and versions) compiled against libc5 be placed. There were offers to make
sevral systems with good network connection available for compilation
libc6 and libc5 packages for the debian maintainers. (Thanks, guys) And I
think this could really help.
Thank you.
Alex Y.
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