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Re: No good user experience of Debian (Was: Packaging r-bioc-simpleaffy)



On Tuesday 01 March 2011 01:37:23 Tony Travis wrote:
> On 28/02/11 22:59, Andreas Tille wrote:

Hi all,

I missed the beginning of the thread but neverthelesse I would like to chip in 
a few thoughts as well.

The goal seems to be to make Debian as attractive to a biologist as MS. Worthy 
goal but

1) When you decide to use Debian (for whatever reason) you accept the 
responsibilities and ideas behind it (like it or not)

So if Debian decides (usually for good reasons) to exclude something then it 
is their decision and one has to live with it when one *decides* to use 
Debian.

2) If you *decide* that you want to use Debian and *not accept* Debian's 
decision then you are on your own to find clever ways to circumvent the 
problems (e.g. set up your own repositories to fill the gap) but you cannot 
expect the Debian people to change their mind.

It is well know that having strict principles will not make your life easier. 
So the goal should not be to change Debian until it will meet the principles 
of MS so your problems will go away but educate biologists that the tradeoff 
is worth it.

If one (biologist) does not *want* to accept the tradeoffs imposed by Debian 
one should rather look for alternatives or stay with MS. There is little to be 
gained *making* people like Debian without them *genuinely* accepting its 
principles.

See. I would like to make my electric car go 900 km per charge like my diesel 
car. Well I either accept the fact that this currently is not possible and 
start to like my electric car or I stay with my diesel car. I am not going to 
lure diesel car drivers into an electric car well knowing that they will 
dislike the experience. And neither will I pressure the electric car maker to 
add a diesel engine so the diesel car drivers will feel at home. It is all 
about decisions.

I personally have stoped to *talk people into Linux*. They either find their 
way themselves (and I will provide support) or they will stay with Windows.

As for the NX example. They went closed source recently.  And if they really 
wanted they could make it run on gcj and IcedTea.So it would be worth the 
effort to kindly ask them to make it work on Debian.

But I probably totally missed the point.

Best regards,
Sebastian


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