Re: Open letter to Debian community
On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, David Starner wrote:
> > And everything takes space! And games! Do many people play XBill?
> I play XBill.
I was inspired by this discussion to play XBill for the first time in years.
Thank you for that, Victor, you've helped me remember one of the little
pleasures in life.
But I find myself disturbed by the outcome of the game. Am I really not a
match for a mere 65 Bill Gates clones? This is a blow to my self-image. I
think I shall have to meditate on this development.
The point (yes, there is a point in here somewhere :) is that Debian is
obliged to serve a very large community. The best way we can do that is by
packaging as much as we can of the software our users will need. Even if a
given package isn't useful to /everyone/, it's useful to /someone/, so it
should be part of Debian.
If we only package "the important stuff", how do we decide what's important?
*Who* decides what's important? I'm sure no Debian developer feels that they
are packaging software that isn't important.
> > Another disadavantage: I analized Potato from the point of russian user,
> > that doesn't need packages that are not related to russian or english
> > languages. I found, that I can drop 100Mb packages!
> Then do so. There's nothing stopping you or a Russian user group from making
> a mini-Debian. I'm sure there's a number of people who would be willing to
> help make a 1 CD Debian for Russian speakers.
Precisely. I don't think Debian is at a point yet where we're ready to start
officially distributing 'subsets' of the OS. But if someone out there feels
this is important, they're free to do with the software as they wish.
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer
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