Re: this post is not off-topic
Well, I honestly didn't intend to just get you and ben pissed. I honestly
believe that I am making a valid point that reflects the opinion of a
significant fraction of the Debian community. And you just might someday
see my name on the NM list. So I'll try this one more time with as much
dry, boring logic as I can muster. :-)
> I certainly do not understand how you come to the conclusion that
> this statement of mine is dishonest;
I didn't mean that perjoratively, but I did mean it logically. There are
two justifications for supporting many architectures on the table:
(1) We wanna.
(2) It's for the good of the users.
(1) may well be true, but it's not exactly part of Debian's "marketing
rhetoric" as embodied in the social contract.
(2) is just not true. It would be, if Debian had sufficient resources to
support obscure arches without hurting mainstream arch support. But
experiment has proved that isn't the case.
My original analogy was meant to illustrate, in a simple mathematical
model, why (2) doesn't work. In this admitedly oversimplified model, your
(rather expensive) hour spent on a mainstream arch is worth
0.98 * (_all_ debian users)
while your hour spent on an obscure arch is worth
0.02 * (_all_ debian users)
The "irrefutable fact" is that 0.98 > 0.02. Now, if your justification is
really only (1), then of course this arguement is irrelevent. But remember
we're talking about justification (2) here. And while I'm happy to grant
your point that this model fails to capture the fact that portable
software is usually better-designed software, and that finding bugs in one
arch can improve the software for all arches, those would have to be
pretty big effects to overcome just how much larger 0.98 is than 0.02
(yes, I made up the numbers -- but any reasonable guess at the numbers
will exhibit the same large ratio).
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