Subject: Re: Linux-Activists - DOC Channel digest. 93-9-13-21:25
From: wirzeniu@klaava (Lars Wirzenius)
To: "Linux-Activists" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1993 13:12:03 EET

X-Mn-Key: DOC

I'm rather far behind my mail reading.  I apologize for taking
so long to answer.

I'm also not sending this to any other channel; me lazy.

> From: Emilio Lopes <[email-masked]>
> Subject:      Linux Standard Distribution (LSD)
> Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1993 17:23:18 +0200
> 
> Well, Linux 1.0 is coming and the LDP (Linux Doc Project) wants
> volunteers to write Linux Users Manual. For the success of Linux,
> and specificaly LDP, I think that a Linux Standard Distribution is
> extremaly necessary. This will make the things easier for the LDP.

I don't think it is necessary at all.  Neither for the success
of Linux (it already is a huge success), nor for the LDP.  Well,
at least not for my System Administrator's Guide; it would
certainly make things easier for Matt (the Installation Guide).
However, getting everyone to agree on anything of importance
is much, much more difficult than documenting all possibilities.
The probability of any one distribution becoming the only one
that gets any attention is epsilon, for arbitrarily small values
of epsilon.  The only way this could happen is if one of the
distributions becomes vastly technically superior to the others
_and_ is vastly easier to use than the others.  The chance of
that happening is gamma, where gamma is a teeny weeny fraction
of epsilon.

If you can do it, more power to you.  I just doubt it can be done.

> While up to now Linux has been a "hacker" operating system, version 1.0
> will be a "public" version (the first!) and this responsability increases
> this necessity of a standard: we must have something to call "Linux".

That's the kernel, of which there is an "official" and standard
version.  Everything else is variable.

Heck, we can't even agree on the version of ls to use, let alone
more important things like init, the man page software, or the
filesystem.

I also strongly disagree that diversity is a bad thing.  If it
were, Linus would have stayed with Minix or MS-DOS.

--
[email-masked]  (finger [email-masked])
It doesn't matter who you are, it's what you do that takes you far. --Madonna