Debian Vision (version 1.0)

[Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com>]

(the following are all loosely ranked according to my priorities)


What's the Debian project all about?
------------------------------------

1.  Community - active mailing lists, maintainers who answer your e-mail, 
      extremely smart people, cool spam filter, really interesting 
      discussions and flamewars...

2.  Good software - Linux, GNU, Perl, Apache, GIMP, etc., etc., etc.

3.  Non-commercial - nobody's trying to make a buck off of me

4.  dpkg - overall, it's pretty slick, and addresses a lot of problems that
      haven't been addressed in the commercial software world
          - database of all files in system
          - install/removal scripts
          - source diffs
          - access methods (ftp, nfs, etc....)
          - not monolithic, so it will adapt quickly

5.  It actually invites it's users to actively participate in the project

6.  Large numbers of maintainers - so each can focus on a small aspect of
      the system - which improves the quality

7.  Documentation - we have potential to be the best documented OS on the 
planet

8.  Cross-platform - potentially

9.  Support - anybody posting a simple question to debian-user usually gets two
      or three solutions to their problem within an hour or so

10. Respectability - the word-of-mouth on Debian is very good - how do you 
think
      we got so many users?

11. The bug system - it does the job admirably

12. Security - we seem to be pretty attentive towards it


Who's our community?
--------------------

1.  Unix network administrators (particularily academic)

2.  Linux hackers

3.  People running ISP's

4.  Web application developers

5.  College students

6.  Business types who are building networks that need to be 
      remotely adminstrated, and where cost per node is a factor

7.  MIS types - Linux works quite well as a file/print server
      and also as a relational database server

8.  HAM radio types - eh, Bruce?

9.  Electrical engineers - like me

10.  Hardcore computer hobbyists - installing Linux as a second
    (or third) OS on their home computers

11. Computer scientists - all those Lisp programs...

12. Professional software developers - CVS, gcc, emacs, java, 
      Perl, Tcl/Tk, Python,etc...

13. Internet junkies - exmh, Gnus, IRC, Apache, Sendmail, etc..

14. Computer graphics fans - POV-ray, GIMP, xv, imagemagick, etc...
 

What could be done better?
--------------------------

1.  Testing

2.  Documentation (where I'm concentrating my efforts)

3.  Fewer flamewars and ultimatums - I really hate these "I'm quitting" posts

4.  dpkg user interface

5.  Organization (notice that I rank this as #5, not #1)

6.  On-line distribution (improved dselect access methods, load-balancing,
      more control over mirror sites, etc.)

7.  Off-line distribution - Red Hat is addressing the shrink-wrapped software
      market - nobody's doing the equivalent with Debian

8.  More "openness" - I don't like the idea of having a "debian-private".  Most
      users I've spoken to don't like it either.

9.  Maintainer verification - we need to address a valid criticism

10. Tight schedules - it's hard as a developer to do everything inside the 
allotted
      timeframe.  Schedules tend to slip -- and not enough time is allocated 
towards
      doing testing.

11. Constant infrastructure changes - the mailing lists have be changed many, 
many
      times over the last year or so.  Maybe this is somewhat unavoidable - 
but it
      would be nice to have a more stable environment.

12. Too many single points of failure - people go on vacation, and things get 
       delayed.

13. The unstable distribution is too unstable at times to do development on -- 
it
       can be a big productivity drain trying to figure out why other people's
       packages screwed up your system

  
That's all I can think of right now...

I'm interested in what other people think - and how they would rank the above.

Cheers,

 - Jim

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