Re: An exam for leaders

[George Bonser <grep@oriole.sbay.org>]

On Sun, 8 Feb 1998, Martin Jackson wrote:

> Problems with Debian that I see:
> 
> 1)  dselect.  Dselect has to be one of the most monstrous programs ever
> conceived from an end-user standpoint.

I couldn't agree more.  That is exactly why it is being replaced.

> I ran through 5 full installs before
> I was comfortable with it -- the conflict resolution screens always confused
> me, especially with the "recommends" and "suggests" levels.  When it was all
> done, I had to answer a lot of questions on arcane packages while being told
> to read the documentation (How?  Where?  The first run of a debian system
> drops you into dselect, like it or not, without a chance to read the
> documentation unless you open another VC, not something an end-user is
> likely to think of.)

When you first enter the select menu item, you get a screen that starts
with:

Welcome to the main package listing. Please read the help that is
available!"

Now, if you look at the bottom left of the screen, you will see something
that says:

? = help menu   Space = exit help   . = next help  or a help page key.

Granted, the help is not the best but it sure helped me.  Also, in the
directory where the install disks are gotten from, there is html dselect
help for the beginner.  Relatively few read it. The F1 key is available
most of the time in dselect too.

> When the dselect system is done, there is no guarantee
> that all the software it installed will work -- notable examples include the
> console svgalib and lesstif.

If you are installing by FTP, you may need to re-run the Configure option
from the menu a few times and the ftp method of dselect is stupid when it
comes to package order.  It might try to install something that depends on
something that has not been installed yet. Running through configure a
couple of times usually cures that but deity is going to fix that problem
so I doubt that must attention is now being focused on dselect.

 
> 2)  documentation hiding.  How exactly is the end user supposed to know
> about man? 

I agree.  help should be aliased to info.  pdmenu would also be a better
default thing to drop newbies into.


> I have been using Debian for close to 7 months now and I still
> don't know whether there is a comprehensive bash-scripting tutorial anywhere
> on the system (man pages are OK, sometimes, but understanding scripts is
> coming very slowly to me).  Likewise, I know of no reference manual for the
> various gcc libraries, especially the g++ libraries.  This kind of complaint
> can be repeated for nearly all of the packages included.

Try /usr/doc/bash. As for other things, it is hit or miss and depends
greatly on how much documentation is in the original source.  If there is
copious documentation in the upstream source, this is usually dropped into
/usr/doc as well when you install the -dev versions of the libs. Looking
for all packages with doc in their names is another good idea.

The glibcdoc package would probably be useful to you as would libc6-doc
and doc++ but there are several more doc packages that would probably
interest you.  Use dselect pointed to the debian ftp site and browse.


> 
> 3)  lack of pine in the main distrib.

This is because pine is non-free.  Compress is not in the main dist
either. You will find pine and pico in non-free on the main ftp site.

> 4)  Lack of PPP setup in main install. 

I have 6 debian machines between home, work and a network server in a NOC.
Only one has PPP.  It is important for the home user, yes. But as a
function of the total number of debian machines installed world-wide, I am
not sure what the total percentage of PPP machines is. I doubt that
putting PPP configuration into the main install would get much support.

In the meantime, have no fear ;)  I am working on just this thing right
now. A newt/whiptail PPP configurator for multiple PPP connections.

> Sure you can set your IP address (if
> you have a fixed one), but as far as I remember there is no mechanism for
> configuring PPP out of the box.  This is a bad mistake, since the process is
> not exactly intuitive, especially if you want to run PPP when not root.

That is another ball of wax.  Users should not be setting up and tearing
down network connections. You might extend that right to CERTAIN users
with sudo or fakeroot or some such but you do not want users able to dial
overseas on your system ;) You can not assume that every system with PPP
has no other network connection or that a system with PPP has only one
modem.
 
> 5)  Lack of ISA PnP support.  This is especially heinous consider almost all
> sound cards and modems made since 1995 are PnP.  Why PnP has not been built
> into the kernel is beyond my ken, but it would certainly make sense.

isapnptools is a start.  A lot of this has more to do with the device
drivers than the kernel itself. The kernel could possibly probe the bus
for PNP cards and put the info in the /proc filesystem someplace but it is
up to the device drivers to use that information.

Anyhow, I *>THINK<* the 2.1 kernels are PNP aware.

> 6)  Lack of graphical browser.  Sure Lynx is a decent browser.  It works.
> But people want to mouse around and click on links.  Lynx does not allow
> that.  (Building an HTML help system wouldn't be a bad idea either.  Apache
> never seems to configure quite right for me...)

There are several browsers in Debian. There is html help too.

doc-linux-html and man2html are a couple of places to start.  You have to
understand that debian gives you a lot of choices but does not impose a
default configuration on you.  This is both a blessing and a curse.  A
very nice system can be built from debian by stripping out the unused
stuff and more thouroughly configuring other things. Please understand
that debian is not designed to be a completely configured turn-key system.
It is designed to be a toolkit from which such systems can be built.

> 7)  It's too easy to hash X server setup by picking the wrong option in
> dselect.  What if you don't pick the right X server?  What if you tell
> dselect to configure XF86Config with the wrong server?  How is the end user
> supposed to know how to fix that?  I wound up blowing away a 500MB
> installation rather than trying to figure it out, and I had been using Red
> Hat 4.1 for a while before that, so I was not completely ignorant of how to
> set up X.

I agree that you need to know entirely too much about your hardware to set
up X.  It would help considerably if the board manufacturers provided
XF86Config entries and set up programs like they do for other operating
systems. Setups as easy as dos or Windows are a lot easier when the
manufacturer provides them as is usually the case with those operating
systems.




George Bonser 
If NT is the answer, you didn't understand the question. (NOTE: Stolen sig)
http://www.debian.org
Debian/GNU Linux ... the maintainable operating system.

===
SEUL-Leaders list, seul-leaders-request@seul.org
===