Re: Help

[Chris Gray <cgray@nowonder.com>]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2000 at 02:20:23PM -0800, Erik Ryberg wrote:
> 
> >
> > Your observation is probably sadly accurate -- people are coming to
> > Linux with zero understanding of the command line or Unix philosophy.
> > I'd prefer to see occasional ribbing a'la Oswald than a less featureful
> > sig.
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 29, 2000 at 11:20:57AM -0800, John Bagdanoff wrote:
> > > I've subscribed & unsubscribed several times over the last 2 years
> > > easily enough, but never could decipher the signature of this list.
> > > Since more and more people from corel and storm distros are joining,
> > > maybe a more decipherable sig could be written?
> 
> If your objective is to keep debian only for former and current Unix users, then your
> proposal/attitude makes plenty of sense.  If you wish to assist the spread and use of linux
> and debian and free(dom) software, then it doesn't.  My own vote is to discard every element
> of geekish elitism immediately.  That doesn't mean discarding the Unix way of doing things,
> it just means helping others get there more smoothly.
> 

I vote we keep the sig.  It is geekish elitism, but when I first figured out
what the sig means, I was moderately proud of myself for about 10 minutes.
I had been seeing this thing at the bottom of each email for months and
finally its meaning clicked.  

It is geekish elitism.  That has been what Debian has been about for
quite a while, and what drew me to it in the first place.  I do want to keep
Debian for at least current Unix users.  Linux might not quite be Unix in
some definitions, but it sure is close.  I'm not saying that there should be
a test to be able to use Debian, or anything stupid like that.  On the
contrary, I think we should keep things as easy as possible.  But it should
also be the best.

It's also the most elegant way to unsubscribe from the list.  
> -- 
> Unsubscribe?  mail -s unsubscribe debian-user-request@lists.debian.org < /dev/null

Chris Gray