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Re: Debian and the User Friendlies



On Thu, Jul 30, 1998 at 10:57:40AM -0400, Bill Leach wrote:
> 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.

There's no need to sacrifice our distribution's quality (it's the
opposite, ease of use improves the quality of the distribution) and
there's no need to compromise on principles. 
 
> 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.

Believe me, we can do it better. ;-) Usually is not a matter of "the
developers don't care", is simply "they are not aware of the issue".

In the last year there have been several subprojects inside of Debian to
improve the ease of use of the distribution. Some of them have given
better results than others, but all of them have one thing in common.
There have been only a few developers working on them, and sometimes they
have been one man projects. For a ~400 people team that cares about ease
of use that's so little participation. 

As this is a volunteers project, we can't force anyone to help in a
subproject, all we can do is talk about the issues and try to convince
others to help.

> 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.

Indeed. As a Debian developer that often tries to "take the bull by the
horns" I would love to see this approach becomes less rare.

--
Enrique Zanardi					   ezanardi@ull.es


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