Hi!
What I read from Bruce here recalls a discussion on linux-kernel where
Linus made the following statement:
Ooh, mommy, mommy, what I have now doesn't work in this extremely
unlikely circumstance, so I'll just throw it away and write
something jcompletely new.
-- Linus Torvalds
At the time Bruce left nearly nobody has understood why he thinks that
Debian does not focus on the end user and can't be improved that way.
I don't recall a statement that sounded appropriate to me where it
shows that Debian doesn't focus on the end user _and_ that we're
unable to resolve this.
It makes me feel very sad that our former project leader - co-founder
of Debian or at least early co-worker - wants to start something
completely new instead of improving our work that is also his work.
It is true that a lot of mechanisms, Debian has at the moment, can and
should be improved in some ways. I have to admit that there are quite
some people working on such issues.
On Wed, Apr 29, 1998 at 08:05:00PM -0700, Bruce Perens wrote:
> Dear Debian Folks,
> 1. Focus on the User
>
> I'd like to have developers who program because they like to see
> their work in the hands of users, especially _naive_ users.
This is the case for a lot of debian developers, not for all of them,
I have to admit.
> Competition with Microsoft and other proprietary systems is a
> stated goal of the project. Market share for the system and its
> derivatives is a stated goal of the project.
This implicates a lot of projects the single project can't fulfil. It
also includes some goals that it may fulfil.
Fulfillable goals
. Easier installation
. User friendly interfaces
. Configuration interfaces other than vi / files for all important
tools[1]
...
New projects
. wysiwyg word processors (sorry, but I don't believe LyX is the
answer, apart from being based on xforms/qt)
. SpreadSheet
. Database / frontends / address db's
. Compound Office packages
. Mail client (sorry, I don't believe that mozilla is the answer)
. Network tools
...
Please tell us where we have to improve our mechanisms according to
your oppinion.
> 2. Maintaining a non-commercial alternative to the commercial Linux
> distributions.
>
> This was one of the most important goals of Debian.
> A non-commercial alternative helps keep the commercial distributions
> stay "honest" by preventing any of them from having a corner on the
> market.
> I think Debian's drifted too far from the mainstream of Linux
> to continue to fulfill this purpose. A non-commercial
What is mainstream? Rpm might be mainstream as most other
distribution have chosen it as their package manager. Hey, this
doesn't make it any better, MS Windows is mainstream, too. This
doesn't justify a movement, too. From the technical point of view
dpkg is superiour in it's features.
From the users point it's handling (-i, -r, --force-something) looks a
lot more logical than rpm (-qiv etc.). I have to admit that dselect
isn't able to handle our huge amount of packages. No point, Culus
works on apt which will be functional and a wonderful frontend for
dpkg. I used RedHat's package manager a few times, glint, on RH 4.2
only, I have to admit. I have to say, that I'm more than happy that
we have dselect and its _functionality_ that is somewhat more
complicated but results in easier handling.
> Obviously, the easiest way to do that is to derive from Red Hat.
If so I feel offended that you posted this on the debian-* lists and
not on redhat-* You're abusing Debian developers who work hard for
this distribution. That's ashaming.
> 3. Provding shared maintainance on the base system for all Linux
> distributions.
>
> This is another early goal of Debian that we've not ever fulfilled.
> A system based on what commercial distributions are already deriving
> from, managed by a non-profit, with shared CVS, might be able to
> realize this goal.
Isnt' there already a distribution based on Debian? (I have to admit
that I don't recall its name.) Wasn't this one of the reasons Mike
Neuffer and Dominik Kubla left? I don't think you seconded that goal
at that time. For this, I'd suggest better helping FreeLinux than
starting another thing.
> 4. Maintaining the Open Source standard of Linux.
>
> We're at the point where we don't really _need_ "non-free" and
> "contrib" directories any longer - all packages in the system
> should be Open Source - let someone else distribute the rest.
Cool idea but this breaks 1. (Focus on the User, remember?).
I would be very glad if we could just skip non-free and concentrate
only on free software. But from my experience only hackers and
experienced users are able to work without all that crap. (like
tetex-non-free, mosaic, kde, xforms based stuff, commercial sql server
etc. etc.)
> 8. Marketing On An Equal Footing with Engineering
> Marketing is important for getting the user's attention and giving
> the user what they want. Lack of good marketing is the main reason
> for the failure of Unix derivitaves to achieve market domination.
> I would put the marketing team at the same level as engineering, and
> have them work together constantly.
> 9. A Random List of Other Goals.
> RPM as the package system - possibly with an APT port later on
> (is that what it's called now?). It's necessary to get the other
> distributions in on the project. We'd have to add a few missing
> features to RPM, but this would be pretty easy to do.
>
> COAS as a system management framework. Non-interactive install.
>
> Limited set of interpreters for system tasks and pre-install and
> post-install scripts. How about ANSI shell (_not_ necessarily Bourne
> shell), Python, and everything else is a compiled executable?
> I'm concerned that Perl is a rather messy language compared to
> Python, and both Red Hat and Caldera seem to be focusing on Python.
Hmm, I wonder if its only me who thinks that this looks like RedHat
dictate you what is good and what not?
Regards,
Joey
[1] The KDE team produces a lot of them like kppp, kisdn, kheise etc.
I don't believe that these is the answer as long as Qt is non-free
but it's a way in the right direction.
--
/ Martin Schulze * joey@infodrom.north.de * 26129 Oldenburg /
/ Experience is a useful thing. Unfortunately it is /
/ only acquired just after one could have used it. /
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