Hey Everyone,
My name is Abraham Raji. I contribute to the Debian project by helping the
Debian JS, Ruby and Go teams to maintain software I'm familiar with the age old
wise saying, "If it ain't broke don't fix it." and most of you will argue that
it's not broken. I agree with you.. for the most part.
Here's what I love about debian.org:
- The website is completely usable from a terminal.
- How accessible it is.
- The team's commitment to adhering to standards.
- The simplicity of it all.
- The general lack of _javascript_.
Here's my wish-list for debian.org:
- Better UI. No I'm not talking about those modern monstrosities that you may
have come across in your day to day lives but something along the lines of
https://thebestmotherfucking.website and if we're feeling particularly pretty
even something like
https://thebestmotherfuckingwebsite.co .
- Better navigation. Suppose I wish to package a ruby library for Debian and
like a sane person I start looking from debian.org and start looking for
resources. I need to go through 4 separate pages before I reach the Ruby Team
page on Debian Wiki. This is assuming I know how Debian works and is not an
absolute newbie. Even if I reach the Team page there's no real way to
intuitively navigate through the various pages maintained by the Ruby Team
except of course for the literal paragraph of links at the bottom of the Ruby
Team page. This is not good.
- Modern Technology to power the website. This is something that makes sense to
me and I'm not going to push for this as much as I would for the top two.
Perl is good... but it isn't great.
Modern day web frameworks aren't exactly perfect and some of them are indeed
pure trash but some of them aren't really that bad either. We would probably
need new volunteers if we switch to a different technology but I would argue
that it is way more easier to find people working with python or ruby or PHP
in comparison to those working with Perl these days and it's only going to get
tougher to find people for Perl as time goes by.
That's it. Just these three things.
If not today we'd have to address these issues someday and then you'd wish that
you had started working on it earlier. I'm not aware of any on-going effort to
address these issues but if there's something like that going on great! I'd love
to be a part of that effort. I hope I haven't offended anyone here but if I have
I would like to say that, that was never my intention.
I am willing to work with everyone here for as long as it takes to address these
issues with the website. I may be wrong about a lot of things here, please let
me know what they are. I would love to hear your thoughts regarding everything
I've said in this mail.
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Abraham RajiMea navis aëricumbens anguillis abundat.
abrahamraji.in