OK, I'll take a crack at it this time.
First off, it seems that the survey is trying to do two separate things:
(1) gauge how much use of Fink there actually is, and (2) probe Fink users
for information about what parts of Fink are most useful to them and how
Fink should evolve, in their view.
I assume that the point of (1) is either to advertise to the world how
great Fink is, or to try to convince Apple to play a greater role in Fink.
I frankly don't think that statistics would have any effect on Apple at
this point. After all, they make and sell an operating system and a few
apps, and they really rely on many third-parties (like Fink) to provide
other apps. I'm sure that they would be delighted to learn about how many
people use Fink, or Photoshop, or PowerPoint, but it's not likely to affect
their business decisions or practices.
Moreover, including this kind of question really does make it look like a
marketing device of some kind. In my view (one man's opinion), Fink is a
project, not a product, and marketing is not appropriate.
As far as (2) goes, some of the questions are excellent, but a few others
seem to specify possible directions for Fink's evolution which need to
be thought through before our user base is surveyed about them. Let me
be specific here:
> Which new feature would you like to see most in furutre versions of
> Fink?
> -> open answer box here
I like this question, with the free-form response.
> Would you find it useful to have Fink distributed differently?
> - --> On a CD
> - --> bundled with Apple Software
> - --> From more than the Sourceforge mirrors
> - --> via Cvsup
This question implies that these methods are being considered. So let's
consider them for a few minutes.
1) A Fink CD would be fine, but someone other than the current developers
would need to volunteer to manage this. Perhaps that person or group
would like to know if there is any demand first, so this question could be
useful. However, it would be better to know that someone is interested
in taking on this project before the question is asked.
2) I had a chance to meet Jordan Hubbard, the lead engineer on the BSD
stuff at Apple, at the O'Reilly Mac OSX conference in October. From his
public remarks and private comments, I learned that Apple's lawyers are
extremely wary of distributing things licensed under the GPL. They will
do it, on occasion, but it makes them very nervous and they try to look
for alternatives.
The fink package manager, and many of the programs which Fink
distributes, are licensed under the GPL. Does this mean that Apple will
never ever do this? No, of course not. But it is very unlikely.
And, as I discussed above, there is lots of third-party software
available for Mac OS X which Apple doesn't bundle. I'm not sure why we
would be any different.
3) I think that finding mirror sites other than SourceForge for internet
distribution may be worthwhile, but (unless we are getting user complaints
about inabilities to download) I don't think we need to survey users about
this.
4) I'm not sure what you mean by "via Cvsup".
> How would you like to help Fink?
> - ->Are you willing to participate in more surveys to improve Fink?
> - ->Would you like Fink to 'speak' your native tongue ?
> - ->Would you consider being a translator?
> - ->Would you help writing documentation for Fink?
The help that we really, desperately need is for more users to be willing
to enable the unstable tree, compile packages from source, and report to
the maintainers their successes and failures. That's much much more
important than finding people who are willing to fill out surveys, in my
view.
As far as documentation goes, there are now three active documentation
writers for Fink that I'm aware of. The first of these, Alexander Hansen,
brings to the task many months of faithfully answering questions on the
user list, and bringing those questions to the developer list when he
didn't know the answers. That's given him a lot of experience for writing
FAQ's and such, and I think that's the path we should encourage. In other
words, the documentation will improve through the efforts of people who
volunteer to answer questions on the lists, and then put the lessons they
learn in the process into writing.
Translation is a tricky question. I don't know too much about how one
internationalizes projects of this nature, but looking at the fink code
itself I suspect that some major work would need to be done (refactoring
the code) to prepare for any internationalization effort. So the first
step here would be to find someone skilled in perl and in this kind of
question who could help with that. The worst outcome of asking this survey
question would be all sorts of volunteers stepping forward and then not
having a way to put their efforts to effective use.
Well, I went on much longer than I had intended, so I think I'll just
sign off for now. In case it wasn't obvious, the part I liked was
questions about which kinds of Fink packages people use, and so on.
-- Dave
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