On 2025-11-02 at 09:03, songbird wrote:
Andrew M.A. Cater wrote:
On Sun, Nov 02, 2025 at 11:36:26AM +0100, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
This would be too broad, IMO. Don't forget that Debian is a
volunteer organisation, its infrastructure running off donations.
Would you find it OK to (ab) use that infrastructure to provide
support for users of highly commercial endeavours, just because
their (well resourced!) overlords skimp on that? (Examples:
Amazon, Ubuntu, Oracle, diverse Androids)?
So I think it's OK to be also able to say "stop: this is an
Oracle Linux question. Please go to their channels).
It's only the "strict" part I'm not friends with.
OK - I'll revise it to "Strictly, discussion of
non-Debian-distributions is off-topic on Debian-user"
Might I suggest "Strictly speaking," instead?
To my eye/ear, that conveys a very different effect/intent from the use
of "Strictly," alone, either at the start or in the middle of the sentence.
To say "foo is strictly offtopic" carries, to my reading, the
implication that discussion of foo will not be tolerated.
To say that "foo is, strictly speaking, offtopic" carries, to my
reading, the implication that while discussion of foo would be
prohibited if the rules were to be read and enforced strictly, in
practice they are read more loosely and/or enforced less stringently -
so it will be tolerated to some degree, as long as it doesn't get out of
hand.
It's better if we don't get thirty five questions a month about
[Debian-derivative] XYZ and can say "Go and look on their forums
(which can be found here) and if they don't have any support,
please feel free to come back to Debian and show us the problem on
Debian"
We shouldn't have to be the last resort for other distribution
users who don't necessarily read past "Debian" in "Debian-derived"
:)
All the very best, as ever,
Andy
thanks Andy, i think the word "strictly" is too harsh and would
rather see "discouraged" or even "strongly discouraged"...
Would the "strictly speaking" wording I outlined above hit differently
from your perspective, as it would from mine?
personally, i have no problem just skipping over things i see as OT
or when i simply just do not have the time to reply (which is quite
often true for me this time of the year anyways).
Having such things made clear up-front does help even the people who
would post them, however, since often enough we *can't* help with things
regarding other distros; knowing not to post those questions here can
help people avoid wasting time and effort.