Re: Some observations regardig the progress towards Debian 3.1
On Thu, Nov 20, 2003 at 01:56:52AM +0200, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> You still haven't commented on the overall idea of always building upon libs and
> other dependencies already in Testing, instead of building on, say, a glibc that
> is in unstable, preventing a few hundred of packages from sliding into testing,
> as it happened a few months ago.
>
> > > is in a releasable state, since everything in it is only built against
> > > the libraries it offers.
This discussion has been hashed out a thousand times over. Go search
the archives of -devel for it and you'll get your answers in spades.
> > Besides other problems, one RC bugs in the chain of packages will cause
> > your proposal to fail.
>
> Actually, no.
Please explain rather than simply saying no.
> Then you might as well stop complaining that nobody has any solutions to improve
> things, if you focus on nitpicking where people missed a spot on how the actual
> system currently works, instead of hearing out what solutions they have.
You didn't reply to half of his email. You gave a theoretical example
but no actual data, and you seem to have ignored the "build packages
for unstable against testing" arguments that have already appeared.
You've demonstrated no real working knowledge of how the system works
(i.e. your "14 days rule" and your rationale for the old evolution in
testing). Your only proposed solution is one that's been rehashed ad
nauseum.
> You should also move to have the "end-users matter" part crossed out of Debian
> project, instead officially calling it for the hackers-only user-hostile bloat
> that it really is, and issue a press release about that.
Got any real specifics on how to make Debian more user-friendly? I'm
all ears. I've asked that question a lot, and the only response I ever
really get is "I want a better installer", which almost always means "I
want hardware autodetection and a GUI", both of which are on their way.
You hear complaints about how old stable is, but backports are a good
workaround for right now while the release process is tweaked and
studied. Other than those two, how is Debian not user friendly?
> Then spend the next 10 years wondering why the masses still ignore Debian and
> prefered switching from Red Hat to Fedora (despite the FUD about its future) or
> continue choosing other distributions over Debian.
I think the fact that this question of how to speed up releases has
come up over and over again that you're being unfair here. We all want
faster releases, and just because someone doesn't agree with *your*
solution of how to get them doesn't mean that they don't care. You
could be wrong, after all.
> Spend the same amount of time wondering why the average user would feel better
> if Debian developpers had added support for non-Intel architectures to Anaconda
> or to PGI, instead of spending 3 years _trying_ to reinvent the wheel and still
> coming up with something that is barely any better than Woody's floppies, from
> an end-user's perspective.
Bashing the install team is really uncalled for here. They're doing a
great job, and since you've apparently not had a look at the thing
aside from screenshots you don't know how much of an improvement it is.
You're a lot like all the people who moaned and bitched how slow
mozilla was back in the 0.8 days and before, and then sang its praises
and used it nonstop once it hit 1.0. The installer isn't done, and even
this first release will be a bit rushed in certain areas. Want to help
on it? Get coding, the gtk frontend sounds like it could use some help.
> Anyhow, I don't intend on wasting any further time on this thread. I read what I
> needed to know and got to notice, once again, what makes Debian so despicable.
Nice to see how far your dedication goes.
- David Nusinow
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