On Tue, Dec 07, 1999 at 08:23:35PM -0600, Philip Thiem wrote: > My 2 cents: > > If you want it easier for newibes or you want a nice GUI. Consider the > following
This is very wrong to think that what all newbies want is GUI for everything. They want browser, they want word processor, they want spreadsheet, picture viewer and many other things in GUI, but most of them dont feel a big need of such Control Panel as in MacOS or MSWin. Ncurses interface for it would be much more convienient for most of them. Of these positions browser is the most problematic now. > 1.) Find people argee about having newbie utils and have time. Debian may be > hard, > but I am certain that most of the people the work on it have lives and > work as > much as they can you need more people that aren't already working on > something. > Let debian create most of the substance, and keep things going. > 2.) Create a new set of projects to solve the problems. You don't have to > fork, > except if some won't let you become developer and they won't let you take > up space with a "experimental" destribution. > 3.) Write interfaces for utilities -- good back end programmers are not > necessarily good GUI people. visa versa. Plus some people like command > prompts. > e.g: Apt still needs a good X gui right? Apt still needs a good console ui either. > 4.) If you want a new help system, make one that will interpret (or compile) > the help from info files. The completely new help system would be nice idea. In all Linuces there are plenty of places where you can find info. Why to know all of them. > 5.) For a GUI download the gnome source code. You do want a GUI environment > right? > See how it does things and come up with something new, or get your > optimization > people on it and fix it. Bit by bit. I'd say let GTK and GNOME worry > about > designing it on large scale, and then someone can go back through just > looking at > code and tweak it like hell. GTK+ is good, but when I tried to start GNOME Session I had to slay(1) myself after 10 minutes of waiting. > 6.) Release it as GPL Quite obvious. > As long as you don't heavily get into replacing base utilities with a > 'without choice' > vastly different program, but instead add to them, there shouldn't be > any reason why the changes won't be incorporated back into Debian. The most promising base packages to replace are: - dpkg ( this packager is a joke !!! ) - help system - to have all info about every package stored in one place > The only problem I see is getting offically recognized by Debian since > new-maintainer > appears SCREWED. Also, if there is some unforseen political reason within > Debian > you may have to creat a "patch distribution" for debian. If you didn't > change the > operating dynamics in adding to debian. You will only have to store > your new programs and add a couple lines to apt-source. If you want to > require > packages and create defaults, use a meta package of many depends. > > If you think I'm being anal, feel free to enlist my help, I not starting > any projects right now because I don't have enough time, but to looking at > code, or writing a bit here and there is do-able. Im not going to start any project nor fork Debian right now. This may happen someday in mid-future, but surely not before potato.
