Re: Resurrecting Indy

[Jean Francois Martinez <jfm2@club-internet.fr>]

Roger Dingledine a écrit :

> On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 12:52:50AM +0200, Jean Francois Martinez wrote:
> > needed) and Debian has huge resources however after eight years of
> > existence their people have still not found time to implement this
> > feature.  If problem is easy and they have had resources and time then
> > why it is still unsolved?
> [snip]
> > A final point is that both commercial and free distribs have the same
> > common problem: their developers live in another world than the users
> [snip]
>
> I agree with your concerns about the other distributions. But you should
> also consider what you can reasonably expect to accomplish. Debian has
> lots of resources and yet nobody has solved some of the user-friendliness
> problems. This is not because they're stupid; it's because volunteers
> work on what volunteers want to work on.
>

They are not stupid.  They don't care.  I have read Ian Jackson manifesto
when
he created Debian.   He tells about how perfect and great  a cooperative
didtribution would be
but in no place he mentions contributing to the growth of Linux, making Linux
easier or helping users
as Debian goals.


I have met many Debian users.  Many were arrogant and defintely didn't want
Linux opening to a large public.
Some of them disliked that attitude but I have met far less of them.  I don't
know which side is dominant
between developers.


>
> Independence is made up of volunteers too, and from my count you currently
> have one developer.
>

You have to learn two things:

1) "Impossible n'est pas francais".   Translation:  "impossible is not a
french word"

2) In two occasions France has been on the verge of disappearing and last
time (June 18,  1940)
we can nearly say that for a moment there was only one french left.

Problem is not not in being alone but in convincing other people to join.
So the question is in defining an idea who can convince people.



>
> Perhaps you should consider other avenues of getting to your goal? Can
> you focus on correcting bugs in current packages or installation scripts?
> Can you focus on packaging new software that "end users" would want to
> use, and then upload those packages to places like contrib.redhat.com and
> rpmfind, not as "this is part of a distribution that is different from
> all the others", but as "this is a package which you might find useful"?
> Perhaps you should focus on a smaller category (eg productivity tools or
> educational programs) and get good at that particularly type of software?
>

Two problems: package gets lost between a myriad of other packages, some of
low quality,
some of hackeristic software.  And gets zero usefulness.   Do you remember
last scene
of "Raiders of the lost arch"?  It is exactly that.

Second:  If there were another distrib  already doing what Indy is aiming for
then there
would be no need of it.   But as I said in my original post: desktop is
presently not a viable
business plan for commercial dsitributions and the free ones are elitist and
server
oriented.

>
> I don't think you can afford to think in terms of a distribution. You
> don't have the manpower or the interest. But there are people here who
> would volunteer to work on a specific small task if they could see it
> directly affect many people -- not in a separate distribution but as a
> patch or addition to the popular distributions.
>

One of the reasons I wanted Indy basing on an existing distrib (besides
of scarce resources)  is precisely because this allows it to make it like a
patch
of a distrib who has those things a free distrib cannot provide like paper
doc or a
presence in 'mainstream stores'.


Is Indy needed?   Yes.   Is Indy possible?  Yes.    But I don't have all the
qualities
needed, specially for communicating or managing.   And communicating is vital

so Indy's fate depends on if it gets a person who can do those things I am
bad at