Re: on forming a new Linux Distribution
On Thu, Apr 30, 1998 at 02:33:54AM -0500, Ean Schuessler wrote:
[..]
> Bruce could have followed the great Freeware tradition of building
> concensus by putting togethor a team of Debianites dedicated to
> creating a newbie-friendly wrapper for the technically excellent
> Debian distribution.
[..]
If there are a group of people interested in doing this still, I am very
much interested in seeing this done and contributing what I can to the
project.
The demo I would want to create for such a thing to show how much Linux can
do without even touching X (mostly for the HD space issue) would probably
not fit Official status very well because I would almost certainly include
pine-src and qmail-src packages in the defaults-to-be-installed area simply
because it's a demo designed to be as easy as possible. NO editor is as
easy (read: mindless) as pico and pine is a user favorite. And the most
config qmail requires after package installation is control/me, which I'd
have a script edit for you.. =p
> Free Software is all about diversity. Any development effort that
> wants to grow to a significant size needs to understand that. The best
> way to make a friendly Linux distribution (be it Debian or any other
> name you should chose) is not to eliminate all the people who are
> deeply interested in the technical component of the work. The people
> who want to make something for the new users should cooperate with the
> die hard hackers to create a system that perserves both sets of needs.
> Either extreme is lopsided.
I agree. Debian is a great dist on technical merit, even though it doesn't
have some of the niceties needed for a home-user who wants to try Linux on
their machine and is willing to learn--but can't really afford a lot of time
to figure out how to handle the common tasks we take for granted.
> At a fundamental level I question the proposition that Debian is not
> concerned with usability. Beyond that I question the fact that RedHat
> is so much more usable than Debian. It may install easier, but is it
> easier to run? You spend a few hours installing your system, you spend
> years running it.
See Crystal's horror story once she got everything installed. rpm is a
file-based dependancy, not a package based. She knew she needed a file, not
where to get it. This is the kind of thing dpkg does well IMO..
> In the interest of diversity and competition I support the idea of a
> Debian faction or even an alternate distribution that is focused on
> the user. I cannot endorse the extreme (ditch dpkg, go work for
> RedHat) that Bruce has gone to.
User-friendly SCREAMS dpkg to me. Not really Debian, but dpkg. rpm is not
nice to new users, though it is more flexable with installing combinations
of tarballs and packages. Still, with as many packages as Debian has, this
is a non-issue really.
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