Hi Mark,
Looks like people are already addressing most of the points I raised
then. I guess I just have one comment left:
On Sat, Aug 21, 1999 at 02:55:33PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> OTOH, one of the things many people like about Debian is the way it
> doesn't try to hide moving parts. It's often nice to know that
> something is happening, and sometimes provides useful information when
> trying to figure out problems. Then again, for some reason it seems
> to scare some people.
Perhaps there should be an "express install" versus "detailed install"
choice that decides this. If you elect for the detailed install, Debian
asks you any question you might reasonably have a different answer for,
and shows you all the whirling gears and motors. You might need this
option on some machines with odd configuration, or if you just like it.
If you choose "express install" then Debian tries really hard to minimize
what it asks you, and is much more willing to use defaults where it can
guess them. Under "express install" for example, Debian could assume
that the contact e-mail for a webserver is "[EMAIL PROTECTED]",
whereas under custom install it would insist on asking you.
At any rate, if all the questions come at just the beginning, or just
the end, or both, then that would improve the experience enormously
with or without this.
- -
> One common convention in e-mail and on Usenet is to reply after the
> relevant text, removing as much quoted text as possible without loosing
> context. Ideally, the reply and quoted material should be interspersed.
> This makes it much easier to follow discussion and reduces bandwidth.
That's not the full convention, or at least not the way I've been
practicing it on USENET and in e-mail since about 1989 (and on BBS's
before that since about 1983).
The full convention is that the subject line tells you what the
message is going to be about, and then the message breaks down into
three parts:
greeting ("Hi Mark,")
standalone thoughts ("Looks like people...")
quoted response (">One common convention...")
The standalone thoughts must relate to the subject, and are not direct
point-by-point responses to things in the quoted-response. Thus you are
free to impose a logical structure independent of the order of material
in the quoted response; and you have a place to sum up your overall
opinion of the issues addressed in the quoted text.
The quoted response includes any specific responses you have to specific
points raised in the message you are responding to.
In the message you responded to, I had no specific responses to the
points in the original message, only overall summary views of my
own, which appearsed in the standalone thoughts. I quoted the entire
response for reference but did not interject any comments because
there were none.
Before you post something condescending like this, you should check
whether or not the person you're writing to used to have a bang path
for an e-mail address, or whether they're so new to the net that
they've only ever known addresses with '@' in them.
Justin
ps: I have the privilege of being the creator of the first banned
USENET newsgroup--the Canadian govt. tried to shut it down,
most Canadian universities (few .com's back then) dropped it,
wired magazine got pulled from the shelves in Canada for
writing about it, and several U.S. universities followed suit
out of paranoia as well. Of course it didn't succeed, but they
tried. I'll let you do your homework to figure out what it
was--yes it was a troll, but a remarkably effective one you'll
admit :-)
