Re: Debian Installer 6.0 Beta1 release (WPA support)
On Wed, Nov 03, 2010 at 04:47:19PM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 03, 2010 at 06:57:52AM +0100, Christian PERRIER wrote:
> > Quoting Harald Jenny (harald@a-little-linux-box.at):
> >
> > > Well the patch is dated in 2008, so yes, people should have been quicker
> > > voting and working for this feature.
Existence of this patch in the BTS means that it's likely people who did
care about WPA saw that it's already done, thought it will be included and
moved to other tasks.
> WPA support is not a "fancy new thing", really. We ask our users to
> install via netinst and for a lot of them, wireless network via WPA is
> the default. Sure, they might possibly be able to dig out an ethernet
> cable, or revert their network to open or WEP, but really, this is not
> some bleeding edge technology.
Without WPA, you can as well stop claiming that the D-I supports wireless at
all. Unlike translations which are merely "nice to have"[1], this is a
quite vital feature for home users. I for one do everything wired, but
looking around, I can't name a single non-technical user I know who has a
wired network at home. And when visiting those, "watch out, your network is
trivially hackable" is something as natural as "oops, your fly is open".
> Would it be possible to only have this in our so-called "expert" mode,
> not worrying about translations (or on an best-effort basis), as a
> compromise?
This sounds like a great temporary solution, especially if you mention that
to install over wireless you need to use expert mode.
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(long rant ahead)
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[1]. Since most of the system is not translated, having a yet another
untranslated line is not the end of the world. And I'm afraid that typical
translations make it hard for even native users of a language to understand
what a given menu entry means. My theory for what might be the cause
involves ambiguities -- in English, the vocabulary is quite set, with few
"innovations" like Microsoft's attempt to rename directory to folder, while
in at least Polish, translators tend to choose words from a large set
without any consistency. Heck, even such basic concepts as "file" have
several translations -- to the point that the name I've been taught
("zbiór") is not recognized by some people who were taught Microsoftish
"plik". I also remember an article in a magazine a long time ago that
listed over 30 names for "floppy disk drive" most of which neither me nor
any of friends I talked to would recognize as the thing.
I personally gave up any attempts to use translations ~12 years ago when I
tried to read Perl docs when sitting at a PLD machine. Even with native
Polish and fluent Perl, I couldn't manage to understand a single sentence --
yet after sshing to a box with English documentation everything became
clear. Such traumatic events can leave people scarred for life.
--
1KB // Microsoft corollary to Hanlon's razor:
// Never attribute to stupidity what can be
// adequately explained by malice.
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