Re: Debian and the User Friendlies
Yes certainly but the issue that comes up again and again is
what 'trade-offs' are acceptable. It seems that within the
developer community sacrificing technical excellence is not
an option. The definition of exactly what constitutes a
'sacrificing of technical excellence' is not a rigidly defined
term. Also, as the KDE "discussions" have clearly demonstrated,
compromising on principle isn't a favorite either.
The perception that developers "don't care about ease of use"
is just plain wrong and only displays a gross ignorance of the
scope and complexity of the issue on the part of the complainer.
I am not here 'firing at' those that identify areas where
improvements are needed, nor even those that 'propose' changes
that fail to account for critical factors but rather at those
that stoop to personal attacks, innuendos, and even assaults
upon the developer community as a whole.
There have been hundreds that perceived a problem, thought that
they had a viable solution and proposed a change. It seem that
there are three responses (really only two) to the developer
community response when that response was perceived as negative.
The first is to defend the original 'proposal', often to the
point of technically irreverent attacks and then 'go away'.
The second is to just 'go away' quietly. The third (rare) is
to 'take the bull by the horns' and serious work on finding
a solution. This latter rare approach has yielded some pretty
dramatic enhancements to the debian project.
On Thu, Jul 30, 1998 at 09:50:37AM +0100, Enrique Zanardi wrote:
> 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$loth is not of much use to debian.
> >
> > Having debian systems being used by 10% of the developers of
> > free software would probably be worth more than having 50% of the
> > user community.
>
> You have cited the main two reasons why Debian needs more market share.
>
> I) "to influence the 'movers and shakers' of the Linux and free software
> field".
>
> No one is going to spend a minute of his time paying attention to the
> words of a really small minority. (See LSB and the RPM vs dpkg stuff).
> Our work as a distribution builder goes from "system level" tools
> (make-kpkg, start-stop-daemon) to "user presentation" ones (menu).
>
> II) "Having debian systems being used by 10% of the developers of
> free software".
>
> In this community, a huge number of the developers were simple users
> yesterday. If they are used to a distribution, they will develop using
> that distribution's style.
>
> If we have to patch every application out there to make it behave "the
> Debian way" our work is going to be really harder.
>
> --
> Enrique Zanardi ezanardi@ull.es
>
--
best,
-bill
bleach@BellSouth.net
b.leach@usa.net LinuxPC@Hotmail.com
from a 1996 Micro$loth ad campaign:
"The less you know about computers the more you want Micro$oft!"
See! They do get some things right!
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