Re: Resurrecting Indy

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Tue, Apr 17, 2001 at 12:52:50AM +0200, Jean Francois Martinez wrote:
> needed) and Debian has huge resources however after eight years of
> existence their people have still not found time to implement this
> feature.  If problem is easy and they have had resources and time then
> why it is still unsolved?
[snip] 
> A final point is that both commercial and free distribs have the same
> common problem: their developers live in another world than the users
[snip]

I agree with your concerns about the other distributions. But you should
also consider what you can reasonably expect to accomplish. Debian has
lots of resources and yet nobody has solved some of the user-friendliness
problems. This is not because they're stupid; it's because volunteers
work on what volunteers want to work on.

Independence is made up of volunteers too, and from my count you currently
have one developer.

Perhaps you should consider other avenues of getting to your goal? Can
you focus on correcting bugs in current packages or installation scripts?
Can you focus on packaging new software that "end users" would want to
use, and then upload those packages to places like contrib.redhat.com and
rpmfind, not as "this is part of a distribution that is different from
all the others", but as "this is a package which you might find useful"?
Perhaps you should focus on a smaller category (eg productivity tools or
educational programs) and get good at that particularly type of software?

I don't think you can afford to think in terms of a distribution. You
don't have the manpower or the interest. But there are people here who
would volunteer to work on a specific small task if they could see it
directly affect many people -- not in a separate distribution but as a
patch or addition to the popular distributions.

--Roger