Re: potato late, goals for woody (IMHO)
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>>>>> "Eduard" == Eduard Bloch <edi@gmx.de> writes:
Eduard> Colin Watson wrote on Tue May 02, 2000 um 05:33:32AM:
[Colin thinks the situation is better than it seems with which I
agree]
Eduard> Sorry, but I am worried about the growth in the small
Eduard> server market. People that have to do the decissions now
Eduard> have to choose between RedHat or SuSE, since these
Eduard> distributions can offer up-to-date software in their
Eduard> stable distribution (whatever they mean by stable). Of
Eduard> course, old debian administrators would use Potato or
Eduard> Slink with some recompiled packages, but new people don't
Eduard> know about such things and just ignore Debian at all.
But ask yourself *why* they ignore Debian... and the answer will
mostly be that they just don't know it/we exist/s.
Eduard> Don't forget that servers and mass-installs are often the
Eduard> places where people come the first time in contanct with
Eduard> Linux, eg. on schools, universities etc. Commercial
Eduard> distributors have realized this fact for a long time, so
Eduard> they change their politics to set their distribution as
Eduard> the default distribution in people's mind.
Wrong. Commercial distributors know about marketing... and marketing
(ads in the Linux Journal, the german Linux Magazin, putting CDs in
mainstream mags etc) works.
Debian doesn't really know about marketing... and even if we did, we
wouldn't have the necessary bucks...
When you go to an expo of any kind, what do you think the average
person will remember? The smallish Debian booth or the big splashy
(carpeted ;-) RedHat/SuSE/Caldera/etc booths?
We can't win this game by *their* rules... actually, we can't win
*their* game. We gotta make our own game and our own rules (just like
Linux did).
Eduard> The market is changing, and the mentioned prozess is
Eduard> recursive. If Debian won't make *compromisses* and change
Eduard> the politics in the next time, we will lose more and more
Eduard> new (and old) users, forcing them to change to alternative
Eduard> distributions and on the end, the commercial distributions
Eduard> will beat us.
I think it's lots more likely we'd *not* win as many new users as
people think (remember, no marketing bucks here), and might *lose*
lots of old hands (a lot of people swear/swore on Debian... because of
the `legendary' stability).
Beware of compromises... somethings gotta give or it's not a
compromise.
Eduard> I'm worried about changing the balances from realy free
Eduard> software to more and more commercial stuff, I don't like
Eduard> more and more machines to become infiltrated by big-market
Eduard> distributions like SuSE/RedHat even if the people wanted
Eduard> to get away from the windows-shit and get a free
Eduard> system. The line must be drawn here - but the Debian
Eduard> community just seems to inhibit itself.
This is a pretty confused paragraph... and this `infiltration' is
something in the *user's* responsibility, and not something Debian can
do.
Okay, so slink *is* old, potato is long overdue. And we should
rethink some things about how we do releases. But we should not ever
go the RedHat/SuSE etc road. No less stability, no rushing, but
better processes (aj's `testing' dist, package pools etc come to mind)
And things like the ill-fated `Slink-and-a-half'... which AFAIK has
not gone into the Debian archives, but should have been. Politics...
Bye, J
PS: Let's take this somewhere else... I set the reply-to to
debian-project (and to me ;-).
PPS: I've seen some people using mail-followup-to (which I couldn't
find in an RFC), and followup-to (which only goes for news)... which
MUAs support these? (Okay, mutt does mail-followup-to when doing a
group-reply... which is nice but not what I actually would want... and
I use Emacs and RMAIL anyway ;-)
- --
Jürgen A. Erhard eMail: jae@ilk.de phone: (GERMANY) 0721 27326
My WebHome: http://members.tripod.com/Juergen_Erhard
GNOME Desktop Project (http://www.gnome.org)
"No matter how cynical I get, I can't keep up." -- Bruce Schneier
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