Re: Announcing Debian Package Tags

[Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>]

On 29 Apr 2003 19:35:47 -0400, Colin Walters <walters@verbum.org> said: 

> On Tue, 2003-04-29 at 14:32, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> On Tue, 29 Apr 2003 12:24:19 -0400, David Roundy
>> <droundy@abridgegame.org> said:

>> To be precise, you said "Maybe novices should only be shown gui
>> programs after all". Not that novices should be allowed to decide
>> to only view gui programs IF THEY WISH, as you said later. The
>> first message impled that some one other than novices decides what
>> to show them, then you toned it down to being a choice of the end
>> user, which is acceptable.

> Manoj, the topic here is tuning Debian for different audiences.
> Believe it or not there are a huge number of people in the world for
> whom if you said "terminal application" or "gui" they just stare at
> you blankly.  In fact they comprise the vast majority of people in
> the world.  For most of these people, most console applications are
> just not usable.

> So having a version of Debian (or more precisely a Debian-based OS)
> which doesn't list console applications by default is entirely
> reasonable.  Maybe you wouldn't use it.  That's great.  That's your
> choice.  But there are people who would.

> I'm not advocating Debian proper itself do this, so if that's what
> your concerned about, rest assured, it will not happen.

	I think we are talking past each other. I think that this
 deliberate culling of all but gui apps may well be the choice of the
 user -- but it should be an choice that the user makes, with an easy
 way of reversing it to see the full power of a Debian system. 

	If this is a distribtuion, and once the installed, the user
 has no way of reversing the blinkers apart from a reinstall, I think
 that is doing the novice a disservice.

	Novices are not novices for ever. But if the system is
 deliberately hidden from them unconditionally, this obfuscation makes
 it had for them to ever learn.

	Every one takes off the training wheels after a
 time. Preventing novice users from being able to do that is harmful
 to them. 

	_That_ is what I object to.

	manoj

-- 
I'm sure that that could be indented more readably, but I'm scared of
the awk parser.  --Larry Wall in <6849@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Manoj Srivastava   <srivasta@debian.org>  <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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