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On Dienstag, Dezember 17, 2002, at 02:56 Uhr, David R. Morrison wrote:
OK, I'll take a crack at it this time.
Thank you, I am more than happy and grateful, that you take the time.
That is partly correct, yes. Somehow I did try to make sure, that I fade the more personal and statistics based questions out.
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.
Would you mind taking the time to set little notes next to my questions, where a 1 denotes (1) and 2 denotes (2) ?
Well the data is not only gathered for Apple. I am sure that we will be needing others Sponsors sooner or later, who knows, we might outgrow SF. Personally I simply feel that it is interesting to collect such data and since it is not mandatory to give it, there is no real argument against asking for it.
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.
Agreed.
Also true, but the at least acknowledge their existence. Of course we aren't Quark, Adobe or Macromedia who supply Apple with a lot of reasons why someone should buy an Apple, yet Fink could become a very big argument once we are looking at the Server market. The Xserver is an excellent Product, even though it is a bit expensive still.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.
I agree, but it could influence the way the treat us.
Moreover, including this kind of question really does make it look like aFrom a personal point of view I cannot quite follow this line of argumentation. I am sure you all have seen marketing based surveys and they are built very differently, since they try to gauge the user as an individual and then ask for specific details of the product or project.
marketing device of some kind. In my view (one man's opinion), Fink is a
project, not a product, and marketing is not appropriate.
I agree, that Fink as a whole is a Project, but every good Project has good public relations and public relations most of the time relies on fundamental Data gathered though good marketing.
I am not going to even begin and try the usual marketing strategies with Fink, but still I need something to work with if I want to offer Fink a strong foundation.
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:
Ok, agreed. I was merely trying to offer a few choices.
Which new feature would you like to see most in furutre versions of Fink? -> open answer box hereI like this question, with the free-form response.
Good.
In this case I am the person which is interested in that ;) So that is a personal question in a way.This question implies that these methods are being considered. So let'sWould you find it useful to have Fink distributed differently? - --> On a CD - --> bundled with Apple Software - --> From more than the Sourceforge mirrors - --> via Cvsup
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 BSDI can only agree about the GPL part.
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.
Well Apple would gain a lot from packaging Fink, because they would lend access to literally hundreds of applications though a little package manager. If they packaged software by Adobe or Macromedia or whatsoever they would most of the time only provide one functionality. Not to mention the license issues and costs.
I agree, we could delete this entry.
3) I think that finding mirror sites other than SourceForge for internetI cannot comment on that, I feel that it is important to know if there is a reason to complain about the SF mirrors. If people choose to ask us for additional mirrors, I would guess so. Maybe this should be rephrased to:
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.
"I would like more than the SF mirrors, they do not satisfy my needs"
Cvsup Daemon. A different method of distributing files via a CVS like repository. The connections are muiltiplexed, servers can sync within each others relams and so on. Just a little extension to cvs.4) I'm not sure what you mean by "via Cvsup".
FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD use this for their source and ports collections.
The help that we really, desperately need is for more users to be willingHow 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?
to enable the unstable tree, compile packages from source, and report to
the maintainers their successes and failures.
I think this should be added as an answer then. -> Would you like to test unstable packages? -> Would you like to port packages -> Would you like to create binary packages
That's much much moreAs I said, I am asking for the email to sort out people who fill in answers at this specific question.
important than finding people who are willing to fill out surveys, in my
view.
As far as documentation goes, there are now three active documentationExcellent, I am looking forward to submissions then. Has he been contacted and asked to write an official FAQ, or is he writing one?
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.
Agreed.
Actually Max mentioned to me, that everything is prepared for such a step. I am not quite sure how he meant to answer my question, but he assured me that it would be no big issue to supply me with the necessary interface.
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.
Allright, we can alter the question to reflect exactly 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.
Once more agreed.
Thank you, I am glad you are taking the time to contribute, please do review the other questions carefully and mark those you would delete.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.
- -d
- - "Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
- - Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream to dream before.." Edgar Allen Poe - The Raven
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