on Tue, Aug 12, 2003, Andrew Malcolmson (andzy@imap.cc) wrote: > The Social Contract states "we will be guided by the needs of our > users". Has anyone done a poll on how many Debian users still run > non-i386 systems? You seem bothered about it. Are you volunteering? > Sure portability sounds nice, but what is a "hppa", anyway? How many > users still run sparcs? Why should I as a user have to spend hours > fiddling with obscure hardware setup issues and avoid recommending > Debian to others so that Debian can run identically on every platform > around. Leave this goal to NetBSD. Translation: "I've got a PC, so everyone else can go fuck themselves. Go run a nasty, hard-to-manage BSD UNIX instead." If you're getting into the portability argument and you cannot even be bothered to go to the ports page to look up what hppa means... well. That's lazy. You can't even be bothered to read the FAQ that addresses *this very question*: http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/ch-compat.en.html#s-arches "Obscure hardware setup issues"? All Debian 3.0 asked me was what make and model my video card was. Given that I've still got the box, identifying it as an nVidia GeForce 4 wasn't TOO stressful. > Anyway, why do we think that portability is a top priority? Can someone > show me Debian's policy statements on this? Read part 4 of the social contract: "We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environment." You sound as though you don't understand that there are no second-class architectures in Debian; if you want an i386-centric Linux, go play with Red Hat or Mandrake. Debian is about (among other things) not excluding people just because their hardware isn't like yours. Regards, Peter.
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