[Mageia-dev] Teamviewer and X86_64 build . . .

[Romain d'Alverny]

Bringing a small bit of controversy, not on the very topic, sorry, but
on a few remarks.

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 15:25, Oliver Burger <oliver.bgr at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Am Montag, 28. November 2011, 15:10:01 schrieb Florian Hubold:
> I don't agree. I do think our main goal should be to provide a good linux
> distro with as few proprietary packages as possible.

Guys, please reread our announcement
(http://mageia.org/en/about/2010-sept-announcement.html ); quoting a
small part of it: "keep a high-level of integration between the base
system, the desktop (KDE/GNOME) and applications; especially improve
third-parties (be it free or proprietary software) integration;".

That was a plan, and plans are made to change and adapt, but still.

> But I don't like us providing more and more nonfree applications.

If we are not to provide (that is package, host and distribute - and
that is perfectly fair) these, couldn't we at least ease that for
others (that would like to package their own apps, or host a specific,
separate repository of nonfree apps that would still appeal to a
significant fraction of users)? That would mean some more doc and
tools for 3rd party packagers. And would solve in the same time one of
the question that was opened on Council and not yet ported to -dev
(aka, very large nonfree packages, such as games -data).

Or do we let them in the cold?

> It really is not that difficult to install things like flash, skype, teamviewer
> and so on.
> In my eyes it would be the far better solution to provide documentation on how
> to install them then provide a lot of those "get-foo" packages.

Right.

> Although "easy usability" is a good thing, people should remember they are
> working on the most complex machine they do have in their homes.

They wouldn't use it if they had this in mind. No one would. :-)

> While nobody expects to be able to use a modern video recorder without reading
> the manual first, everybody expects to be able to use a far more complex
> machine like a computer without reading anyting?

That's a fallacy. There's no excuse for making things more complicated
that they need to be.

It's not absurd that most people _expect_ that installing an
application on their system is as simple (and as safe) as a drag'n
drop or as typing an URL in their browser. Their focus is beyond that.

Romain