Hello all. Some time ago there was a posting on the list stating that typical Debian user is of SysAdmin type. The guy received a lot of negative responses and as a result we have now dotfile-generator in the distribution as our statement of being friendly to novices. Good thing, but what is Debian target audience anyway?
Let's get serious, office worker would rather go with Caldera (if Linux at all), ISP - with FreeBSD, newbie - with RedHat, etc. Debian is the effort of a large number of developers and primararily *for* developers. No, we don't forget newbies (dotfile-generator), office workers (Freedom Desktop), ISPs (ongoing MTA discussions) but we DID forget dvelopers. Here is why: 1) Every developer using commercially available libraries is forced to stay with libc5 developmental tree for a while. 2) Every developer (even one NOT using commercial products) is interested in having recent versions of the freely available libraries. 3) Every user (including developers) is interested in having recent versions of freely available applications (editors, debuggers, viewers, etc.) 4) It is preferable for everyone to have only one runtime library (either libc5 or libc6). Having applications using both does eat up memory and slow down system. (that's why we are having deadlines for converting libc5 packages in hamm ) 5) In the situation with libc5 -> libc6 transfer developer stuck with libc5 will not be available to enjoy goddies from the 2)!!!, 3) and 4) because all new software will be compiled against libc6. I hope you agree that situation is not acceptable. My proposition, which I already stated, is to have in addition to "stable" and "unstable" something called "unsupported" where would all newly available packages (and versions) compiled against libc5 be placed. There were offers to make sevral systems with good network connection available for compilation libc6 and libc5 packages for the debian maintainers. (Thanks, guys) And I think this could really help. Thank you. Alex Y. -- _ _( )_ ( (o___ | _ 7 ''' \ (") (O O) / \ \ +---------------oOO--(_)--------------------+ | \ __/ <-- | Alexander Yukhimets [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | | | http://pages.nyu.edu/~aqy6633/ | ( / +-------------------------oOO---------------+ \ / |__|__| ) /(_ || || | (___) ooO Ooo \___) -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .