Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian
On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 03:22:09AM +0200, Fabian Fagerholm wrote:
> On Fri, 2002-01-04 at 02:23, Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote:
> > smooth introduction? you never heard of policy, maint-guide, developers'
> > reference, web pages, etc, have you?
>
> Many operating systems have accompanying "certification" courses. These
> serve the need of gathering a knowledgeable user base to run the systems
> (MCSE, Sun cert, Cisco cert and so on). Why not try something similar,
> but less formal and on-line, in debian?
IMHO, that comes from experience and not memorizing some manuals. IMHO, these certs are useless pieces of paper. You
learn things by fixing bugs and reading how others fixed bugs..
> As for the web pages, there is room for improvement. You don't need to
> comment on this; I know, I shouldn't complain and should do something
> about it. I'll try to do that.
IMHO, there is a _huge_ amount of servers that are not connected from main page... As of a week ago I could not find
any links to qa.d.o, nm.d.o, buildd.d.o, etc.... It would be nice to have them at d.o/devel
> Agreed to 99%. But I maintain that target audience is of importance for
> coordination. There's a big difference in making, say, an email server
> compared to a desktop system. The former may assume a certain level of
> confidence in mail systems and computer systems in general - it's ok to
> have debconf ask some complicated questions, or requiring the sysadmin
> to edit configuration files. The latter would require quite a different
> approach, and could not make the same assumptions about the user's
> knowledge level.
> It may be possible to make a one-size-fits-all system which can fulfill
> the requirements of both the above examples, but we are already seeing
> some specialization occur, for example with the debian multimedia
> distribution. So target audience is important: how do you define "good
> documentation" and "good packages" if you don't know who is going to
> read the docs, and install the packages? There's more to it than having
> no spelling errors and as few bugs as possible.
IMHO, the questions asked by installation scripts are very clear.. For even a novice admin that is... After all,
isn't admins or admin-wanna-bees what are installing a new system anyway? IMHO, I don't think that there is anything
too cryptic being asked for desktop installation...
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