On Tue, 2002-12-17 at 08:56, David R. Morrison wrote: > 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.
I think this summarizes my feelings on it as well, better than I could have done. =) > 4) I'm not sure what you mean by "via Cvsup". This is another method of distribution that uses a combination of rsync and CVS for getting updates. If I understand it correctly, it's more expensive as far as local storage, but updating is cheaper, so it tends to be preferred by people on slow links... > 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. YES! I get maybe 1 success story a week from users, despite the fact that I maintain (to varying degrees <g>) a huge set of packages. I know that "KDE" works, but I would like for more people to say "hey, ksirc is broken", or "why is kolf so slow?". I know some bits of KDE don't work, but most of the time I can only do spot checks. Starting and running 300 applications is pure madness. Therefore I've only done it once or twice. =) Oh, and as to the issue of CDs, I'd be willing to take on putting together a Fink CD, and the necessary tools/scripts/etc. to automate CD generation as much as possible. ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by: With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility Learn to use your power at OSDN's High Performance Computing Channel http://hpc.devchannel.org/ _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
