Re: LSB specification of runlevels
On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 01:38:41PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 09:40:18AM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> > The bottom line is that with attitudes like this, it's no wonder that
> > Debian has interfaces which are actively hostile to new users, even
> > new users with over decade of Unix experience.
>
> With an attitude like this, it is suddenly much less of a mystery why LSB
> seems not to give a damn about Debian and distributions based on it.
>
> The assertion that Debian's interfaces are "actively hostile to new users":
> 1) is subjective at best
> 2) belied by the development of debconf
> 3) belied by the work I've done over the past 3 years to make XFree86 less
> unpleasant to deal with on Debian systems
> 4) indicative of irrational prejudice
>
Wow, feeling just a little defensive, aren't we?
My feelings about Debian is that it's a very good distribution --- for
what it is. I've switched over most of my machines to use Debian,
because apt-get is a very good, very clean interface. So I like
Debian quite a lot. It's a great distribution for experts. And for
the sort of things that I need to do with my systems, it's actually
the best distribution to use, and so I'm using it on most of my
machines.
But at the same time, I'm coming from Debian as something with a lot
of Unix experience (over 15 years), and a lot of Linux experience (ten
years, having started with Linux 0.09). And I can tell you that it is
painful for new users to use. It's basically Unix cubed; the
information is in hundreds of Unix man pages *somewhere*, or perhaps
in some file somewhere in /usr/share/doc/*, but God help you finding
it. And the Debian packaging system in particular, while it's very
nice, is built of layers on top of layers, and without the oral
tradition for someone to explain to you how all the pieces fit
together, trying to figure out things about how Debian works can be
very frustrating.
This is stuff that most Debian developers take for granted as second
nature, and so they don't understand why it's so hard to figure things
out, just as most Unix power users have no idea why rank novices have
so much trouble learning Unix from scratch.
So I don't think it's an irrational prejudice; I rather like to think
that I have a fairly balanced view of Debian, both in terms of what
it's really good at, and where it badly needs improvement. And I may
have a better view of things, because I'm looking at it from the point
of view of an outsider who is trying to figure out how to do things in
Debian, as opposed to a Debian loyalist who gets irrationaly defensive
the moment someone suggests that there might just possibly be wrong
with their beloved distribution.
Debconf is a big step in the right direction, but there are still
large parts of Debian which depend on oral tradition in order for
users to see how the various pieces fit together. For example, how
are new users supposed to find out about dpkg-reconfigure? It's not
mentioned in most of the other man pages, and there's no high-level
"so this is how you get things done" document. I stumbled on it
purely by accident, and for a long time I just assumed that once you
had configured a package at install time, the only way to change
things was to purge the package, and then using an editor to edit the
raw debconf data files, and then reinstall the package.
I have tried to do my part, in terms of writing taking the time to
write long, detailed messages explaining different places where a new
Debian user who hasn't been given the secret handshake can get badly
lost. (For example, I once spent several weeks trying to trace down
the maze of twisty shell scripts and programs which make up the
kernel/dpkg/build system, and found out that because I had put an
apostrophe in my name in /etc/kernel-pkg.conf, the build process very
logically gave an error message about not being able to determine the
version number from the debian changelog file. This is one that got
fixed, so that you no longer need to know that the way you enter an
apostrophe in your name is to use Ts'\''o. But it's all little stuff
like this which cause people to lose weeks and weeks of time and tear
out their hair in frustration.)
So basically, if I were maintaining a machine for my Great-Aunt Emma,
I might very well use Debian, assuming I could login to the machine
remotely and fix stuff when things went bad. But if I were
recommending a machine to a novice user where the goal was to minimize
my own support time, today I have to say I couldn't choose Debian.
There are too many rough edges that haven't been sanded down. Part of
the problem is that Debian is a distribution which is primarily
written by Debian Developers for Debian Developers. So while some
people are very good about making their part of Debian as easy as
possible for users to use, not all Debian Developers have the same
priorities in this direction. Contrast this with a distribution where
people get paid full time to make it easy for novices to use, and it's
no wonder that Debian might have a few more rough edges, even without
people who don't feel that Debian should "coddle" the newbies....
- Ted
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