Apt repository interoperability

[Daniel Botelho]

Hi!

 >I personally think - as an engineer - that if we continue to "help" a
 >Windows user amplify their unsustainable world view - the one where it's
 >fine to just click "Ok", we loose the single biggest evolutionary gain
 >that Linux represents.
I kind of discord of your point-of-view... First as also an engineer,
I don't see no harm of just one click instead of 20, plus writing
several lines of "encrypt" code to several files.
If you know exactly what we are going to get with it, it just makes
our life easier( and that's the point).

By the way, your opinion is straight valid if you are those who think
that only Engineers/Scientists or informatic gurus use Linux.

Best regards,
Daniel Botelho

On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 3:58 PM, Onno Benschop <onno at itmaze.com.au> wrote:
> On 26/04/08 19:27, Herman Robak wrote:
>>   If the distro simply makes it too hard to do <stuff>, since <stuff> is
>> deemed to risky for naive users, funky workarounds will pop up, especially
>> in communities like Ubuntu's.
>>
>>   I think that this indicates that neither the user interface nor the
>> community do quite enough to explain and aid best practices in a way
>> that empowers, enlightens and satisfies new users.
>>
>>   There is a technical problem behind this: The best practices are quite
>> hard to wrap a Windows-user's mind around.  If user education fails, it
>> may be time to adjust the curriculum
> I suspect that this debate may well travel down a well trodden path if
> we're not careful. I mean to say, that the world we are creating is
> becoming more and more simplified to the point where the simplification
> is harming actual evolution.
>
> Perhaps I'm not clear in my meaning, so I'll try to say it in another
> way. If we continue to simplify Linux in an attempt to assist the user
> who has a misguided understanding of "how it works", we run the risk of
> reaching a point where Linux becomes an environment that is so simple
> that it achieves nothing for everyone.
>
> While I understand that end-users who come from a world where the
> "Windows view" dominates experience a distro as "too hard" with "too
> many obstacles", a growing population is beginning to realise that
> installing every single application available and upgrading stuff for
> upgrade-sake is a path to oblivion.
>
> I personally think - as an engineer - that if we continue to "help" a
> Windows user amplify their unsustainable world view - the one where it's
> fine to just click "Ok", we loose the single biggest evolutionary gain
> that Linux represents.
>
> While I feel the pain of a new user who updated their sources.list and
> added repositories from all over the globe, I am unable to support them.
> Instead I take the opportunity to give that single user some education -
> which is often a bitter pill - but the user benefits in the longer term.
> It is an identical situation to a grad-student arriving at your
> help-desk counter with a corrupted floppy disk that contains their
> thesis. You attempt to help, but ultimately they learn to make better
> backups.
>
> This might all sound like I'm advocating to abandon all users who
> innocently or otherwise break their own system. That is not the case.
>
> I think that it is not helpful to hide some complexities in life. I
> think that the way that Windows did that might have felt simple and
> easy, but I see my clients every day spend hours and hours of wasted
> time on fixing things that should never have been possible in the first
> place.
>
> Making apt repositories interoperable may well be a good thing, but I've
> yet to see an argument to convince me of that.
>
> --
> Onno Benschop
>
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