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Re: how to make Debian less fragile (long and philosophical)



On Mon, Aug 16, 1999 at 11:17:08PM -0400, James Mastros wrote:
> One step at a time, my friend, one step at a time.  If you needed to know
> 1M things before to diagnose the problem, now you only need to know
> 1,048,575 things.
> 
> Also, it means you don't have to explain to hold down shift and type
> init=/bin/sash real quick to your grandmother.  You have to explain to hold
> down shift and type emergency (though IMHO "recovery" would be better under
> the don't-panic theory... especialy if you are doing consumer tech support),
> which is, yes, only a hair better, but better it is.

Better how? You've made the easiest step of the whole process marginally
easier by saving four words of the explaination. The process is
mechanically just about identical. And now the person is sitting in
front of a prompt like this:
 >
What do they do now? If you can walk them through the procedure to go
from ">" to a working system, you can just as easily walk them through
the requirements for getting to ">". I can't even imagine a document
which can impart enough information to recover a severely damaged system
that doesn't explain the fundamentals of how the whole system works--at
which point the init=sash is obvious.

Mike Stone

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