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Adrian von Bidder | 2 Apr 2007 21:23
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Re: Linden Lab (Second Life) using Debian

On Monday 26 March 2007 16.24:25 MJ Ray wrote:
> [...] too much news-style ick in the user
> list. That would make it have less impact, as readers will notice and
> may discount it as marketing more than reports.

Hmm.  This begs the question of the purpose of this users list.
 * we want to show that many people do indeed use Debian, and use it for 
some stated reason.  --> mostly marketing.
 * we want to know who uses Debian so that we can improve Debian to better 
serve our users.  --> more market research than marketing.

I always assumed the list to be more the first kind of list than the second, 
but of course, as I've shown in this discussion, I'm not involved too 
deeply in how this list is created.  I have, however, never seen anybody 
refer to list entries in discussions about improving Debian - IMHO the 
second kind of feedback is coming in via bugs.d.o and the various mailing 
lists.

(... topic drift: it is in such situations where I always feel the www pages 
could really profit from a clearer structure[0], e.g. by using subdomains 
or clear visual distinctions - color schema, whatever: a part for people 
who don't know about Debian and stumbled over the name, a part for Debian 
users, from newbie to expert, and a part for people contributing (or 
wanting to) to Debian (DD and others.)

Obviously there's overlap since we want people in the first category to 
become people in the 2nd, and people there to become people in the 3rd 
category, so there's always going to be grey areas.

Now the entries in the users list would certainly be written differently
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MJ Ray | 3 Apr 2007 17:27
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Re: Linden Lab (Second Life) using Debian

Adrian von Bidder <avbidder <at> fortytwo.ch> wrote:
> On Monday 26 March 2007 16.24:25 MJ Ray wrote:
> > [...] too much news-style ick in the user
> > list. That would make it have less impact, as readers will notice and
> > may discount it as marketing more than reports.
>
> Hmm.  This begs the question of the purpose of this users list.
>  * we want to show that many people do indeed use Debian, and use it for 
> some stated reason.  --> mostly marketing.
>  * we want to know who uses Debian so that we can improve Debian to better 
> serve our users.  --> more market research than marketing. [...]

I thought it was:
  * we want to give potential or current users a way to find other
similar users in case they have questions that the other support
channels don't answer.  => mainly user support.

I may have that impression from finding the use reports through the
route www.debian.org -> Support -> Other support resources -> related
links -> Organisations using debian.

Some other projects I work on use user lists more as a support/
user-networking tool than marketing.

Hope that informs,
--

-- 
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Webmaster/web developer, statistician, sysadmin, online shop maker,
developer of koha, debian, gobo, gnustep, various mail and web s/w.
Workers co-op  <at>  Weston-super-Mare, Somerset http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
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Alexander Schmehl | 6 Apr 2007 14:34
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draft of the release announcement; please review

Hi!

You might have noticed some activity on some lists pointing out, that it
might a good idea to prepare a special announcement.

A draft is available at http://people.debian.org/~tolimar/release.txt
and will updated with reflicting your reviews comments and patches to
correct my germish as my time permits it (remember me to set up an svn
(?) repo for that kind of stuff).

Many thanks,
  Alexander

PS:  Sorry andremachado for not yet reacting on your other mails, but as
you see we are quite busy :)
PPS:  You don't need to point out, that the date is wrong ;)
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Justin B Rye | 6 Apr 2007 14:49
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Re: draft of the release announcement; please review

Alexander Schmehl wrote:
> A draft is available at http://people.debian.org/~tolimar/release.txt

Can you explain what's meant by (or point to another phrasing of)
the final phrase here?
> This release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to
> the installation system supporting scripts using composed
> characters and complex languages;
--

-- 
JBR
Ankh kak! (Ancient Egyptian blessing)
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James Westby | 6 Apr 2007 14:57

Re: draft of the release announcement; please review

On (06/04/07 14:34), Alexander Schmehl wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> You might have noticed some activity on some lists pointing out, that it
> might a good idea to prepare a special announcement.
> 
> A draft is available at http://people.debian.org/~tolimar/release.txt
> and will updated with reflicting your reviews comments and patches to
> correct my germish as my time permits it (remember me to set up an svn
> (?) repo for that kind of stuff).

Hi,

A couple of suggested changes.

> With immediate effect Debian GNU/Linux can be
> downloaded, and will soon be available on DVD and CD-ROM from numerous
> vendors <http://www.debian.org/CD/vendors/>.

I'm not sure about "With immediate effect". I changed it in my diff, but
it's not a crucial change.

> Please note that
> the release notes will be further improved and translated to other
> languages.

I made this sentence a little more explicit, I hope that I captured your
intent.

> Debian 3.1 is another important step in that direction.
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Michael Banck | 6 Apr 2007 14:40
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Re: draft of the release announcement; please review

Very nice.

On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 02:34:29PM +0200, Alexander Schmehl wrote:
> A draft is available at http://people.debian.org/~tolimar/release.txt
> and will updated with reflicting your reviews comments and patches to
> correct my germish as my time permits it (remember me to set up an svn
> (?) repo for that kind of stuff).

"Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system"

I'd write "Free" here, but dunno.

I'd put Iceweasel first in the list of Ice* stuff.

Also, "are automatically handled by the aptitude package management
tool" looks a bit dangerous, maybe qualify that as "mostly automatic" or
"automatically handled for most configurations..." and mention the
release notes a bit earlier, so people don't stop reading and fire up
aptitude dist-upgrade.

Michael
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Alexander Schmehl | 6 Apr 2007 15:49
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Re: draft of the release announcement; please review

Hi!

* Justin B Rye <jbr <at> edlug.org.uk> [070406 14:49]:

> Can you explain what's meant by (or point to another phrasing of)
> the final phrase here?

Sure.

> > This release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to
> > the installation system supporting scripts using composed
> > characters and complex languages;

The installation system is based upon different modules (e.g. filesystem
creation, language settings, ...).  The user interface is modular, too.
AFAIK we had one module for userinteraction in sarge, the textual one
with the red boxes on blue ground.  Etch will ship with another one, a
graphical one (based upon gtk and framebuffer).

The graphical user interface supportes languages the textual user
interface does not support, since they need special characters.  The gui
can compose special characters to display the signs of those complex
languages.

Please see
http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/i386/release-notes/ch-installing.en.html#s-inst-changes
for further information about that.

Now that I'm rereading it, I must confess, that this sentence could need
some clarification.
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Justin B Rye | 6 Apr 2007 16:13
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Re: draft of the release announcement; please review

Alexander Schmehl wrote:
>>> This release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to
>>> the installation system supporting scripts using composed
>>> characters and complex languages;
(ie:)
> The graphical user interface supportes languages the textual user
> interface does not support, since they need special characters.  The gui
> can compose special characters to display the signs of those complex
> languages.

It's the writing systems (and character sets) that are complex, not
the languages.  How about:

 This release introduces a newly developed graphical frontend to
 the installation system supporting languages that use complex
 characters in their scripts.

Great to see Debian Etch finally getting native language installer
support for >50$ of the world!
--

-- 
JBR
Ankh kak! (Ancient Egyptian blessing)
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Steve McIntyre | 6 Apr 2007 16:03
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Re: draft of the release announcement; please review

On Fri, Apr 06, 2007 at 02:34:29PM +0200, Alexander Schmehl wrote:
>Hi!
>
>You might have noticed some activity on some lists pointing out, that it
>might a good idea to prepare a special announcement.
>
>A draft is available at http://people.debian.org/~tolimar/release.txt
>and will updated with reflicting your reviews comments and patches to
>correct my germish as my time permits it (remember me to set up an svn
>(?) repo for that kind of stuff).

The sentence

"Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of
eleven processor architectures, includes KDE, GNOME and Xfce desktop
environments, features cryptographic software, is Compatible with the
FHS v2.3, and supports software developed for the version 3.1 of the
LSB."

is a little ugly - it runs on too much
s/Compatible/compatible/
s/the version 3.1/version 3.1/

My suggested replacement:

"Debian GNU/Linux is a free operating system which supports a total of
eleven processor architectures and includes the KDE, GNOME and Xfce
desktop environments. It also features cryptographic software and
compatibility with the FHS v2.3 and software developed for version 3.1
of the LSB."
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Alexander Schmehl | 6 Apr 2007 17:21
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Supported languages (was: draft of the release announcement; please review)

[ adding bubulle to cc: ; he knows the details about that best and might
  be able to help us here]

Hi!

* Justin B Rye <jbr <at> edlug.org.uk> [070406 16:13]:

Thanks for your suggestions; I'll add them later.

> Great to see Debian Etch finally getting native language installer
> support for >50$ of the world!

Speaking of that remindes me to the numbers at [1].  According to them
Etch will support the languange of 57% to 61% of the world population.

Earlier I was wondering, if we should add that to the announcement,
since it's an impressive number.

But writing something like: "the installation system for Debian
GNU/Linux has now been translated to 58 languages, which covers 57% of
the world population." leafes to many questions open (and I think an press
announcement should avoid that).

Has anyone any suggestion how to phrase that, so that it's still short
but understandable?

Links:
  1: http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/i18n-doc/languages.html

Yours sincerely,
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Gmane