A lot of choice is not always good
I wanted to install an ftp server. So I started
dselect and searched for names containing "ftpd".
How many ftp daemons do you think there are on
the Woody distribution CDs? 2? 3? 4 maybe?
There are TEN. bsd-ftpd, twoftpd, wu-ftpd,
proftpd, lukemftpd, muddleftpd, vsftpd, ftpd,
an ftp daemon written in Perl, and one written
in Python. That's EXCLUDING tftp daemons.
Having 10 ftp daemons on the CDs is a lot
less useful than having the best 2 or 3. I
don't want to spend half an hour researching
which ones are the best. I just want to install
a good ftp daemon. How many other programs on the
CDs are unnecessary duplicates of each other?
Suddenly, Debian's proud boast of including
far more apps than the other distros looks
very dubious.
Before somebody flames me for "not understanding"
that Debian is driven by volunteers and that what
goes on the distribution is whatever volunteers
choose to put there, I'd like to point out
that "volunteer" does not simply mean someone
who works for no money. That's only part of it.
A volunteer is someone who is motivated by
the desire to serve the goals of the organisation
he or she works for. I'm sure that in the case
of at least five of those ftp servers listed
above, the best way the maintainers could serve
Debian and its users would be to drop the program,
and recommend one of the others in its place.
Nick
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