Re: An exam for leaders

["Martin Jackson" <mjackson@deskmedia.com>]

>Every leader should issue a _severe_ critic of the distribution he uses.
>No praises allowed, no mentionning of other distributions except for
>comparisons unfavorable to the distribution used by the candidate.
>Focus must be on suitability for end users and on structural problems:
>bugs are made to be fixed so you are allowed not mentionning them
>unless they are persistent.  We have one week.  People failing to be
>severe enough, will have two days to issue a second version.  If this
>one is still not good, well, you decide.


I, Martin Jackson, seul-pub leader, accept your challenge.  En garde,
miscreant! <g>

My distribution of choice is Debian.  I changed back to Debian after buying
commercial RedHat 5.0, but that's a different story entirely.  I am a
hacker-in-training, almost at what Eric Raymond calls "larval stage," so I
imagine I am closer to being an end-user than most of the rest of the
seul-leaders list.

Problems with Debian that I see:

1)  dselect.  Dselect has to be one of the most monstrous programs ever
conceived from an end-user standpoint.  I ran through 5 full installs before
I was comfortable with it -- the conflict resolution screens always confused
me, especially with the "recommends" and "suggests" levels.  When it was all
done, I had to answer a lot of questions on arcane packages while being told
to read the documentation (How?  Where?  The first run of a debian system
drops you into dselect, like it or not, without a chance to read the
documentation unless you open another VC, not something an end-user is
likely to think of.)  When the dselect system is done, there is no guarantee
that all the software it installed will work -- notable examples include the
console svgalib and lesstif.

2)  documentation hiding.  How exactly is the end user supposed to know
about man?  I have been using Debian for close to 7 months now and I still
don't know whether there is a comprehensive bash-scripting tutorial anywhere
on the system (man pages are OK, sometimes, but understanding scripts is
coming very slowly to me).  Likewise, I know of no reference manual for the
various gcc libraries, especially the g++ libraries.  This kind of complaint
can be repeated for nearly all of the packages included.

3)  lack of pine in the main distrib.  OK, pine is not the world's best pop
client.  pico is not the best editor.  But both of them are the most likely
of their classes that end users are most likely to be familiar with.  I had
to ftp pine and pico from the Debian ftp site with my Windows setup.  Pico
would also be nice to have as a basic editor -- it is far less intimidating
than vi or emacs, even if it lacks their capabilities.  (End user love their
email, you know...)

4)  Lack of PPP setup in main install.  Sure you can set your IP address (if
you have a fixed one), but as far as I remember there is no mechanism for
configuring PPP out of the box.  This is a bad mistake, since the process is
not exactly intuitive, especially if you want to run PPP when not root.

5)  Lack of ISA PnP support.  This is especially heinous consider almost all
sound cards and modems made since 1995 are PnP.  Why PnP has not been built
into the kernel is beyond my ken, but it would certainly make sense.
Instead of having the machine take card of it for you, you have to run
another program and edirect the output...which I found out by reading the
man page.  Remember my earlier gripe about man?

6)  Lack of graphical browser.  Sure Lynx is a decent browser.  It works.
But people want to mouse around and click on links.  Lynx does not allow
that.  (Building an HTML help system wouldn't be a bad idea either.  Apache
never seems to configure quite right for me...)

7)  It's too easy to hash X server setup by picking the wrong option in
dselect.  What if you don't pick the right X server?  What if you tell
dselect to configure XF86Config with the wrong server?  How is the end user
supposed to know how to fix that?  I wound up blowing away a 500MB
installation rather than trying to figure it out, and I had been using Red
Hat 4.1 for a while before that, so I was not completely ignorant of how to
set up X.

Martin Jackson:  mjackson@deskmedia.com
=======================================
Information Science Major
Mankato State University
=======================================

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