my thoughts on package management

[Havoc Pennington]

On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 04:31:39PM -0400, Paul Iadonisi wrote: 
>   Havoc Pennington has made exactly this point at least a few times in
> various forums when people argue about user interfaces.  What many
> people on these mailing lists forget is that the user base of a distribution
> is typically two or three orders of magnitude larger than the mailing
> list participation.  The kind of people participating in the mailing lists
> are typically not representative of the entire user base (rhl-list may be an
> exception, I don't know).

Another kind of bias is that people only complain about what they
don't like, very few people ever praise what they do like.

That is if you have 100 people who like it how it is and 10 people who
don't, you'll get 10 complaints and 1 praise, which looks like a 10-1
vote for changing it.

You find out the reality when you change it and suddenly get 100
complaints and 0 praise. ;-)

Anyway, this is why you really have to understand the goals and
rationale for why the software is how it is, otherwise you sort of
just keep changing it back and forth in response to complaints.

>   I like choice too, which is why I typically replace metacity with sawfish
> on my systems (sorry, Havoc, I know I keep jabbing you with that.  hehe ;-)),

I don't mind one bit, though. ;-) I understand there are tradeoffs and
everyone will use what they like, and that's all good.

Havoc