Re: Debian and the User Friendlies
Enrique Zanardi <ezanardi@ull.es> wrote:
> 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.
This is not a bad thing, at least, not in and of itself.
Remember Eric Raymond's "The Cathederal and the Bazaar"? Well, it
referred to Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month", and pointed out where
some of its implications didn't hold. However, the underlying problem
still exists: two-way communication costs grow as the factorial of the
size of the group.
Free software projects do well where we can take advantage of broadcast
mechanisms. Person responsible for ___ sends it somewhere and then
20000 people (or whatever) can test it use it, give feedback, etc. This
works well when the project is somewhat mature. This works when you're
threshing out the design goals (and the design is fairly mature). But
there are some things that are still better done by someone who can
spend the time understanding every facet of what's going on and figure
things out.
Release early and release often works, but you have to have something
to release, and some problems take significant work to hash out.
That said, I wish the "developer's corner" on the web server had an
"open projects" area, where debian folk could register project urls
and descriptions (er.. this should only be for projects that satisfy
DFSG).
--
Raul
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