default setup (was: Sendmail woes (was: make anacron a base package))
On Thu, Apr 01, 1999 at 09:18:24AM -0500, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> I was disapointed then the group decided that we needed "one" MTA to be
> the "default" for Debian. This whole approach goes counter to the
> fundamental premis, that Debian provides Free choices to the end user. Our
> current approach makes taking optional choices more difficult for the new
> user.
Since when was it a fundamental premis of debian to not have defaults? That's
one of my biggest complaints, people think we shouldn't have nice default
setups because it recommends one free package over another. Well, this is
stupid, all free software is not created equal. By your reasoning we should
not even have profiles during install time, we should make have 2 selections
'All' or 'None', would that be good? I dont think so. Same thing happened
with xterm once, the maintainer changed the default color scheme to white on
black instead of black on what, and people bitched and moaned it was changed
back. Why?! I guess people want to have the crappiest setup possible by
default so you will have to spend forever trying to make it work nice. I
guess thats one of the reasons we dont have color ls enabled by default too,
you can always change it. Having a nice default setup does not limit users
in any way, so why not do it?
sorry for the long rant, this has been something that has bugged me for a
while.
--
Stephen Crowley
Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org
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