Re: GCC on a Pentium running Win95

[Bill Geddes <geddes@col.hp.com>]

Mr. Schumacher makes a good point.  It should not be overlooked. 
Debian is a very strong distribution, but lacks in some areas.  
The website does have a lot of information, but it is not organized 
in a way that leads you to information.  Also, it could be more complete.
I believe that all of this is related to the roots of debian - the 
development effort is dominated by a lot of VERY knowledgeable guys whose
knowledge and experience have yet to be captured in a cohesive set of 
documents.
If you haven't been deeply involved since the "beginning", debian
doesn't make things easy for you.  Not that individuals won't help, just
that there are so many details that require a guru to take care of - things
that shouldn't require that kind of help - that it can be discouraging.
Like installation.  I know that this is being worked on, and it has 
improved over the years I have used debian.  I really like the packaging 
system - now that I've discoverd "apt".  But I have to cheat and go get apt
after I have a minimal working system because it couldn't be put into
the stable distribution - a mistake since leading people (especially new
folks) into using 'dselect' is just not a way to say "Welcome to the world
of Debian/GNU Linux".

My point here is not to flame.  Debian's weakness can easily be corrected,
in my opinion, by working on two simple areas:
1. Website - It is organized by and for experienced developers.  Change
it to serve the majority of the population which does not yet, but wants to
use debian.  There's a lot of good information, but it's scattered all over.
Make it task-oriented.

2. Installation - It's getting better, but too many times, there are things
which require a call to a guru.  Simply knowing where to go when things
are stuck would help.  Limit the choices, emphasize getting a working, useful
system alive.  After that, choices are the strength of debian, and apt makes
it positively easy to get an application, and dump it if you don't like it.
But getting there is not easy, yet.