[users] Dropping the repotag

[Dag Wieers]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:

> Mike McGrath wrote:
> > Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> >> Michael Schwendt wrote:
> >>  
> >>> Why would a __user__ want a repotag?
> >>
> >> I thought this was EPEL and did thus not involve any users rather then
> >> administrators of all kinds.
> >>   
> > I don't think we should get in the business of guessing about our users
> > until they show up :-)  I'd imagine people interested in EPEL range from
> > extremely experienced admins and architects that understand the need for
> > a community driven packaging repo, to people that don't realize that
> > installing mandrake and SuSE RPM's on the same box is a bad thing and
> > they just so happened to find us because Google said so.
> 
> True ;-) But to assume the audience is __users__ maybe contradicts the
> EL in EPEL ;-) It is also why I mentioned 'administrators of all kinds'.
> 
> I should probably also mention that these 'administrators' will likely
> be supporting their own systems, and thus may want to know what repo a
> certain package came from -see comment from earlier message by Greg Swallow:

First of all, an Enterprise Linux is what every non-technical person 
should use if they'd pick a Linux distribution. My general remark to 
newcomers is to tell them that an Enterprise Linux is what 99.99% of the 
population needs. Fedora and other bleeding edge distributions that turn 
around every 8 or 10 months, are fine for technical people like you and 
me, but everyone else should not care about having the latest and 
greatest, and generally do not want to upgrade if there is no need to.

So wrt. the audience, the majority is going to be non-technical users. 
Maybe not today, but in the unforeseeable future.

Luring a non-technical newcomer into Fedora (or Gentoo for that matter) is 
a lost newcomer, unless they have their personal sysadmin (which only a 
few have and personal sysadmins scale bad). The experience will be worse 
than Windows and it will look like there was an alterior motive.

Think of your mom as the audience and think of the system as a stable, 
non-changing environment that may only be reinstalled when there is an 
absolute need to. (She might not like the new Open Office changes, or the 
difference in behaviour or look of her computer, so why bother)

(The 2 other major use-cases apart from non-technical desktops are 
servers and appliances like mythtv)

BTW I do have a userbase and it does not include only technical people. A 
lot of users don't even use yum or apt, but google for packages.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]