Re: Carving out a niche (Re: Redhat 6.1)

[Greg Lindahl <lindahl cs virginia edu>]

> 	The question I was getting at in the last post was not really 
> "Should we build a better distro because none are perfect?", but rather 
> an underlying theme that accompanies it: self-sustainment vs. adaptation.  
> Should AlphaLinux focus on very specific niches where it historically fits 
> in well, or continue in an attempt to be 'all things to all users', 
> covering every market that Linux/x86 targets?

I don't really understand the question. I picked RedHat because I
wanted the same distribution for Intel and Alpha machines, and at the
time, RedHat was the only one. I don't think RH puts much effort into
getting tetex and ghostview to compile, so the cost of going from a
working server distribution to a full client distribution is probably
pretty small. Given the general distribution, I do the work required
to get things working in my niche. That's my focus. No one else really
shares it (I have very particular ideas about how things should work),
nor do I expect them to.

I don't need sound drivers. I don't care about sound drivers. I expect
that the people who care about them will do that work, and if they do
it, we should all help make sure it gets into the overall kernel and
distributions.

So, in short, I don't see how "we" are going to focus on anything.
We're an anarchy, just like the rest of Linux.

-- g