Re: Who is a Debian user?
On Sun, Aug 26, 2001 at 12:20:51AM +0200, Claes Andersson wrote:
> To all people that answered me, I think you are missing my point - or - I do
> not express myself well enough.
I think you have an interesting point that's being lost in the flames over
/bin and /sbin... The Debian project says that one of its primary priorities
is it's users. But who exactly is meant by the word "user"?
Of course, there is no well defined answer.
One could say that a Debian user is anyone who installs Debian on a
machine. This means that users are all system administrators of some
degree (they have root).
Another way to interpret it would be to say that anyone with an account on a
Debian box is a user. Certainly this is the kind of user Claes is refering
to. This is also the traditional meaning of user on Unix systems. But with
single user unix workstations common these days the line between user and
sys admin is blurred.
My opinion is that a user of Debian is an administrator. Those are the users
of the Debian distribution. They may have other users of their systems (or
may themselves be the only user). Debian is not directly responsible for the
experience of the end users, but, to make the administrator's job easier we
should do what we can.
So if an end user calls you on the phone for help, tell them to contact
their machine's system administrator, as he/she is the one responsible for
the machine. Only if the administrator can't fix the problem is it a flaw
in the Debian distribution.
As an aside, this kind of admin vs user arrangment will probably be rather
different under the Hurd, where users can do a lot of things normally only
done by root. Perhaps for that some designs (like /bin vs /sbin) will have
to be changed.
--
Steven Barker scbarker@uiuc.edu
Success is getting what you want; happiness is wanting what you get.
GnuPG public key: http://www.students.uiuc.edu/~scbarker/pubkey.asc
Fingerprint: 272A 3EC8 52CE F22B F745 775E 5292 F743 EBD5 936B
Reply to: