Re: SEUL: Article by Alan Cox

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

In message <3624FC2E.964487A5@jps.net>, wearl@jps.net writes:
>  An excellent article. I feel that the SEUL project is dangerously
>close to falling into the situation presented in the article. I have
>volunteered my time for the SEUL project, have faithfully read all the
>posts to all the lists for the past month or so, and I STILL have no
>idea what we are trying to do here.

Actually, seul used to be in that situation, but I've at least partially
pulled it out. A year or so ago, it was a lot of people chattering
about distributions and such. We killed all those threads, and pretty
much kicked most of the people off the project. The problem with it now
is that we have an initial hill that we need to get over, and the
remaining 'core team' doesn't currently have the time to devote to get
to the top of it. Check out the url pointers at the top of our current
faq, for more details on this. Or ask me questions, and I can elaborate.

Treat seul as a new project, starting with a manifesto and a whylinux
document, with some drafts of other things (survey, commercial port
howto, Micah's little game, etc).

>Simple End User Linux. What does that mean to the organization? To me,
>it means the development of a distribution of linux that a normal
>end-user can install and use. Has almost nothing at all to do with the
>posts that I have read here or in the other SEUL lists.

We are not working on a distribution. Other people are doing that
better than we are. We don't have the right skillset currently to work
on a distribution, and every time we consider it we get swamped by a
bunch of people who have no real clue how to do it.
See www.independence.seul.org, an affiliated project which is working
on a redhat-based distribution. There is a large overlap in workers.

>Will someone please clarify this point? Before I can "show you the
>code", I need to know what I'm supposed to be doing.

Our manifesto plus todo list will hopefully be sufficient to figure
out what's up with seul. If it isn't, please let us know (specifics)
so we can fix it.

>On another note, I volunteered to assist in the upkeep of the website,
>and have yet to receive confirmation of the creation of my user account.
>Will the person responsible for this please email me (off the list)
>regarding this matter?

Whoops. Dealt with.

Thanks,
--Roger