Re: Debian and the User Friendlies
On Wed, Jul 29, 1998 at 02:07:53PM -0400, Bill Leach wrote:
> There is fundamentally no reason why debian has to have a large
> market share. It can be argued that debian needs to be able to
> influence the 'movers and shakers' of the Linux and free software
> field. The need for this influence is at the 'system level' and
> is not much concerned with 'user presentation'. Thus, popularity
> in the sense of Micro$loth is not of much use to debian.
>
> Having debian systems being used by 10% of the developers of
> free software would probably be worth more than having 50% of the
> user community.
You have cited the main two reasons why Debian needs more market share.
I) "to influence the 'movers and shakers' of the Linux and free software
field".
No one is going to spend a minute of his time paying attention to the
words of a really small minority. (See LSB and the RPM vs dpkg stuff).
Our work as a distribution builder goes from "system level" tools
(make-kpkg, start-stop-daemon) to "user presentation" ones (menu).
II) "Having debian systems being used by 10% of the developers of
free software".
In this community, a huge number of the developers were simple users
yesterday. If they are used to a distribution, they will develop using
that distribution's style.
If we have to patch every application out there to make it behave "the
Debian way" our work is going to be really harder.
--
Enrique Zanardi ezanardi@ull.es
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