Re: Proposal
On Tue, Nov 17, 1998 at 05:28:43PM -0500, Ben Collins wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 17, 1998 at 11:20:11PM +0100, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> > Although it is out of context, let me quote something from the social
> > contract I feel appropriate here:
> >
> > We Won't Hide Problems
>
> How do you equate removing packages from the distribution that cannot be
> installed as is to a 'problem'? If anything, it is a problem having
> packages in a distribution that cannot be install with out the user
> getting some things on their own, to new users this is a royal pain in the
> ass.
>
> Not hiding problems doesn't mean not fixing them.
>
> Imagine if you were installing Solaris, and you got into the nifty gui
> install and started going thru the software and you see this nice program
> you want install....click it....pop....a screen comes up telling you that
> that software needs a package which you do not have and to go to the ftp
> site to get it....and oh yeah, you probably wont be able to get it
> legally...."wait a second"..."my system isn't even setup yet and they want
> ME to go and get a package so that this program works? WTF!?"
IMHO, it is not within our tasks to satisfy _unreasonable_ user. Saying WTF
counts as unreasonable to me. Let me answer with a counterexample:
The user looks for the package in question, which is perfectly reasonable
because it is free and not restricted. He does not find it in the packages
list. Now, either he does believe "Sad, Debian is poor, because it does not
contain this package" or he goes and asks us, finding out that he has to get
_BOTH_ packages, the free and the restricted one via ftp. This is even
harder to do than to get only a single package (especially if the
installation programm is silent about the possibilities).
I am living in a country where internet usage is _expensive_ (and it is
expensive in most places in the world). Getting as much free software on CD
as possible is something that I consider of high value (it really saves
money for us who are living in such a country).
There are the following two main benefits about this:
1) The number of packages the user actually has to download is minimalized.
2) The installation program knows about the situation and can inform the
user about strategies to solve it (for example, adding a mirror from another
country to the sources list of apt). Just being silent about it is more
annoying and confusing to the user, IMHO.
The arguments you gave up to now are based on the assumption that we will
piss off an unreasonable user. It is not an assumption I would like to base
the discussion on. You can never satisfy all people, so lets concentrate on
the general user (without attributes).
> If they have a CD/install of some kind that is missing a restricted
> library we should not asume that they can go and get it, since that is why
> it is restricted in the first place, hence, if it depends on something not
> there, leave it out. Now if it suggest the restricted package, I don't see
> that as a serious problem, but depends is something else.
If the user really can not get the restricted package at all, he can
safely ignore the package in the packages list. Maybe there are some users
who can use the sources to start from there to something they can use in
their country. Why do you want to prevent this possibility in the first
place? Free Software is succesful because people go and improve the sources.
This is why we make Debian, to spread software. Removing perfectly free
software seems to be against this goal (I would agree if a lot of packages
would be affected, but the number in question is really low).
Thank you,
Marcus
--
"Rhubarb is no Egyptian god." Debian GNU/Linux finger brinkmd@
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