On 03/05/2012 03:40 PM, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote: > But before getting there, the question is whether the existence of the > website (and its popularity) poses problem to Debian reputation and/or > to the activity of official Debian multimedia packaging. I think this is > a question for the Debian Multimedia Maintainers (as in > <pkg-multimedia-maintain...@lists.alioth.debian.org>) to answer. If they > see a problem with debian-multimedia.org, we should get in touch with > the website maintainers and solve the issue. >
I do think this website hurts Debian, and its user community. Let me explain, it's based on my past *user* experience. Years ago, I was fooled into thinking that d-m.o was there only to address licensing issues, and bring packages that couldn't go in Debian. But d-m.o does a lot more, like re-packaging things that are already in Debian, and working very well there. It's not clearly written in d-m.o that it can screw your Debian installation, particularly when upgrading from version N to version N+1 of Debian with d-m.o package installed. But I've seen multiple instances of this issue over the years, on both desktop and server side. It is *extremely* easy to get confused, and think that the issue is in Debian itself, when in fact, it's really d-m.o who fu**ed-up your system. Users will *not* get it, I'm sure of that. The issue with the donation thing is that d-m.o author could be seen as a savior, who brings things not in Debian, and thus would deserve money (as a user, I was fooled into thinking this way in the past). But the reality is completely different, and I now do think that the Debian multimedia team would deserve the money a 100 times more than d-m.o author. Yet, they don't get the respect from the community, and even less the support (this thread is a proof of it). Now, I'm really not sure what we can do about the above. Maybe absolutely nothing... Everyone has the rights to make alternative (bad) repositories and advertize (well) about them. Maybe politely asking to mention better that this is unofficial could be done, but I experienced the above fully understanding what I was doing, and the fact that it wasn't official repos. I don't think a bigger mention of the fact it was unofficial would have helped me in any ways. Just my 2 cents as a (past, and unhappy) d-m.o user, Thomas P.S: Thumbs up to the debian multimedia team for their work in Squeeze, it is a brilliant desktop thanks to them. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/4f548dda.8060...@debian.org
