Re: Daemon's Advocate article

[Garance A Drosihn <drosih@xxxxxxx>]

At 6:23 PM -0500 2/29/04, David Cuthbert wrote:
> Jonathon McKitrick wrote:
> > the advocacy article at DNews had an interesting point: that the
> > BSDs could end up being used only by developers, and not 'average'
> > or should I say, typical users.
> >
> > Do you agree or disagree with this?  Will DFly have any effect on
> > the big picture?

It's probably not fair to trot out a tempting philosophical bikeshed
like this right at a time that Matt can't type much...

> ... thanks to RedHat, who made the install process much smoother and
> understandable to non-developers (...). DF isn't focused on this
> regard -- from a technical standpoint, installation issues aren't
> terribly interesting, and mostly involve tedious bugfixing and
> tweaking to run on ill-behaved hardware -- so I'd have to say no,
> it probably won't have an effect here.

Several of Matt's ideas *will* make the system more friendly to
average users, so I disagree with your claim.  There are already
firm ideas on a better installation process, and he's hoping to
make it much easier and less-errorprone for the user to keep all
their ports in sync.

I'd say it's too soon to sit back in our armchairs and wax poetic
about what Dragonfly will and will not be.  At this point in
OpenBSD's development, it was just a fork and it didn't have a
personality of its own.  What Dragonfly will be in five years
will depend on what projects are tackled by Dragonfly developers.

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@xxxxxxx