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RE: Future of Debian uncertain?



Hi person!

Bfeeney, the author of the article you mention, also says these dumb
things...

"This comes back to my clever installer theory, my expectation is that the
installer should shield users from mechanics of what it does." --bfeeney

??SHIELD USERS?? (during installation, there are no users, only
adminstrators)

"I really do admire what Debian has achieved, it's a great effort, and the
fact that the distro has stood the test of time is to be applauded. I just
think that it should aim to be as easy to use as Redhat and friends, without
necessarily being like them." --bfeeney

??Easy to use as Redhat?? Something tells me that although user bfeeney has
run RedHat 5.x, they did not attempt to upgrade through 6, 7 and into 8.






> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alfredo Valles [mailto:alfredo@citma.cu] 
> Sent: Tuesday, February 25, 2003 4:21 PM
> To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Future of Debian uncertain?
> 
> 
> Hi people
> 
> I write this email hoping that some of the people who make final 
> decisions for the Debian project will read it, that's why I write to 
> this list.
> 
> Have you read the review of Debian 3.0 at 
>  http://www.debianplanet.org/node.php?id=831
> 
> I'm quite new in Debian but I like it a lot, I really do, but been 
> honest I find 90% true this review. So I'm worried about 
> Debian's future.
> I believe Debian is the best OS and I'm very proud of use it 
> at work and 
> at home. I also believe that it represents the living proof of a new, 
> viable, fun and more productive organization of work.
> At least that's what I used to think until I realized how very few 
> people are attracted to Debian these days.
> 
> I live in a small country, but our linux community is growing 
> fast, we 
> are hundreds now, I know many from our discussion forum, yet 
> only 2 or 3 
> of us use Debian (or Debian based distros). Everybody loves RH, Suse, 
> and Mandrake. Even the most advanced users prefer RH for 
> servers because 
> it's the distro they know well and is widely used.
> I can't recommend Debian to my friends, cause nobody wants to 
> spend 2 or 
> 3 days hand tweaking the system, only to get to the point where 
> commercial distros leave you 30 min after you put the install CD.
> 
> Personally there are a few things I hate about Woody and I would like 
> someone to tell me why these so easy to solve issues are 
> still around. 
> For example:
> 
> 1-The installation process almost always misses to recognize 
> sound cards 
> and network. But ironically, Debian CDs include Kudzu, which 
> have always 
> worked fine for me detecting and configuring these devices 
> once you have 
> manually installed it with dselect. Isn't that dumb?
> Now that there is knoppix available I don't see any reason for Debian 
> not having a real first class installation system with a very good 
> hardware database.
> 
> 2-After you install the desktop environment with tasksel the 
> gnome fonts 
> are "BIG". Took me a day to figure it out how to change that.
> 
> 3-All the bash limits are set by default to unlimited except 
> the stack 
> limit, which is set to 8 Mbytes. This make programs which 
> work with big 
> arrays in memory to die with a laconic "segmentation fault". Took me 
> almost a week to discover this one, after I stripped out a large 
> scientific program seeking for an "invisible" bug in the code, not 
> having a clue it was a system issue. I wonder how many 
> scientists have 
> tried Debian for extensive computer calculations and having encounter 
> this same problem have simply switched back to another distro.
> 
> 4-Finally but most important: What happens that you haven't included 
> kde3 even in unstable until a few days ago? Why so many 
> packages are so 
> out of date?
> 
> I have heard that a bug problem in libc6 is the cause of this 
> delay, but 
> I don't see Knoppix or Suse hanging every day, and they do 
> have the last 
> soft, so they have found a way to circumvent this problem. Why can't 
> Debian do the same?
> 
> I have also been told that Debian supports eleven 
> architectures. That's 
> really great! But if this prevents from having the last software 
> available in an official repository for the arch that 95% of 
> people use, 
> then I think something have to be done. One obvious solution 
> could be to 
> allow the development for different architectures to diverge 
> temporally.
> Maybe you need to create another classification scheme a little more 
> complex than the usual stable, testing and unstable.
> I would propose something like: Stable_arch-independent, 
> Stable_arch-dependent, Testing, Mixed and Unstable. Where 
> Stable_arch-independent would be what stable is now, same 
> soft for every 
> arch. Stable_arch-dependent would be the most stable branch with the 
> latest soft and libraries versions that have proven stable for a 
> particular architecture. Of course, Testing, Mixed and 
> Unstable have to 
> be arch-dependent too. Testing would be pretty much what it's 
> now. But 
> Mixed would be a kind of mix of a testing debian system with the very 
> latest soft compiled on the fly with a system like the one 
> Gentoo has. I 
> understand that Debian has some tools to generate a .deb package from 
> sources using a custom script, so it shouldn't be so difficult to add 
> dependency resolution capabilities to this system, and make 
> this beauty 
> available in Debian too.
> 
> Being new and inexperienced I have a high probability of been talking 
> nonsense with this new schema stuff. But my point is that 
> someone with 
> the expertise and good ideas has to come up with something new that 
> could help Debian to follow a new paradigm: easy of use, good 
> look and 
> latest soft without sacrificing its current strengths.
> 
> One would get the impression that Debian is now a bit 
> bureaucratic and 
> reluctant to changes. Maybe it is not, but that's how it 
> feels like for 
> a newcomer. I wonder how decision making is conducted in Debian? Is 
> there a guy (or a closed group) who take decisions like the 
> holding back 
> of so many new soft, because of the libc6 issue?  How can we 
> (the users) 
> participate in the decisions of really important matters? Is Debian a 
> democracy? (I hope so)
> 
> If somebody is gracious enough to give me some answers I would 
> appreciate it a lot, and perhaps I can recover my faith :-)
> 
> I have said all I feel. I hope it's understood I only want 
> Debian to get 
> better. I also hope that my lack of knowledge in some issues could be 
> forgiven together with my poor English.
> 
> 
>   Alfred
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
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> 

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