Donnie Berkholz wrote:
Not necessarily. I just wrote on my blog [1] about this, and got a
constructive comment [2], which I'll talk a little about.
Here's one example of a global goal: Reduce the learning curve of Gentoo
and increase its usability.
Sounds like a good idea, but as Ciaran already said, 'low learning
curve' and 'great usability' are just opposite things. Also, it is
*very* vague.
This goal would involve a number of projects:
- - Releng would work to ensure that installing Gentoo is as easy as
possible.
This is very vague too. Easy for who? Easy for a user who is too lazy to
read docs and doesn't have any experience or easy for a sysadmin with
plenty of experience trying to setting up Gentoo on a cluster with >100
boxes? I think this makes it pretty clear that there is not simply one
implementation referring to one idea, but I'm afraid that these 'goals'
could be misused to force a common direction instead of having multiple
efforts addressing the same idea in different ways.
- - The portage team could conduct usability studies of portage (perhaps
with the help of openusability.org?).
'to conduct usability studies' sounds great, but it's IMHO not much
more. I don't need studies to point out annoying things from a user
perspective, I'm a user myself. Sure, feedback is good, but we already
get feedback, in the form of bug reports.
- - Others
How do e.g. arches fit into this scheme? Yeah, sure, they make Gentoo
easier to use because they keyword stuff. Great. I'm really glad
somebody tells me why I am doing the stuff I've been doing for more than
a year.
So, the 'easy to learn/use' goal might be a goal that quite some
projects already are trying to attain, but it really isn't *THE* goal
for Gentoo, is it?
--
Simon Stelling
Gentoo/AMD64 Operational Co-Lead
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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