[Mageia-discuss] Attention, please

Thu Feb 24 16:50:47 CET 2011

On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 09:36 +0200, P. Christeas wrote:
+> On Wednesday 23 February 2011, André Machado wrote:
+> 
+> >           T H E [ R E D ] A L L I A N C E
+> > 
+> > ... which would be a global network where developers and users of these
+> > distributions could exchange knowledge and information and share resources
+> > to assist in developing mutual their distros.
+> > 
+> Sorry Pal.
+> you come second.
+> 
+> I've been shouting about that for the past 2 years. Even before Mandriva had 
+> dissolved.
+
+Mandriva is in fact still going, at least after a fashion.  Let's not
+care who is first or second - the way to build support and consensus is
+to welcome newcomers to the fold...
+
+In general, in making a standard, you have to ask
+. who will benefit?
+. who will use it, and what are their needs? (not the same question!)
+. who will need to do work to change?
+. what are the costs and drawbacks?
+. who will feel they are losing out, and how do you accommodate them?
+. is there already work in the area that more or less meets everyone's
+needs, and just needs to be tweaked a little? If not, then you first
+have to develop a technology.
+
+It may at first sound like, if you can install the same package on all
+systems, the users have benefited.  But if it means the strengths of
+each distribution are diluted, the result will probably be the emergence
+of a single distribution that is easier for most use cases, but that
+can't easily be customised for special cases.  So you make it harder for
+smaller distributions to survive, and that in the end may hurt users. An
+example might be that cross-distribution packages would be less likely
+to support the Mandriva XFdrake administrative tools, less likely maybe
+to use /etc/alternatives (since other RPM-based distributions often
+don't) and so on.
+
+> But, still, the choice of people was to go the SVN, isolated way of working.
+
+So, present an alternative (autopackage?) and make it work.
+
+Liam
+
+-- 
+Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
+Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
+
+