Martin 'Joey' Schulze is still aggressively writing against Dunc tank.

I don't agree with his posting at all. I don't think dunc-tank is doing any serious damage to the project; so far all the damage comes from a few people (especially you, Joey), that play some "politics" game here I don't really get or like. And just count the number of people who have expressed discomfort with your postings. I remember having seen the word "blackmail" attributed to some of your mails.

[Update: and it also sucks that people have to point out that they didn't reduce their Debian involvement because of Dunc tank, but just because they don't use the software anymore, have too little time or are annoyed by your behaviour; otherwise you'd probably cite them as dunc-tank enemies.]

I'm also convinced that your assessment - that only the release in december counts - is false. You know, the people working on Debian were NOT replaced by the announcement of the dunc tank experiment.

We still want to make Debian the "Universal OS", and are still dedicated to the projects goals.

But some of us still remember the bad press debian has been receiving because of the delays with sarge release, and the users we have lost back then because of pushing back the release again and again. You know, many people still act like "yeah, debian releases in december, sure, when hell freezes over".

One of Debians strengths was security support. But security support doesn't work as well, when half of the software you're running are unsupported backports. If Debian wants to remain a good base choice (i.e. universal OS), it needs to provide a reliable combination of secure but not too-out-of-date software to become useless again. Therefore I consider frequent-enough, somewhat-on-time releases important for the universal OS idea; this will also cut down on our work (at least for those doing backports, too, since we need to do less of them). It's not a primary goal, but a consequence of the well-established goals.

Now why I accept the experiment of 'hiring' the release managers for one month full-time: I've always had the impression that donating to Debian is somewhat pointless, because I don't see any concrete results, or where the money is going. To me it always felt like it ends up in an unused saving account with the SPI treasurer, until someone finds a way to spend it. Here the money is used in a transparent way, on well-respected people and with a very concrete result. And remember, it's an experiment. It's a one time thing so far.

Oh, and to actually counter all your blah-blah: I've actually recently increased my Debian efforts again. Because of the dunc-tank thing, and despite your end-of-the-world-claims. Namely because it gave me back the feeling that someone actually cares about making Debian useful to everbody (and not just us freaks running unstable and experimental). That there is some interest in getting the new release out of the door on time, of supporting our users out there such as the city of munich (which is also running backports AFAIK). To me Debian is still mostly about the users, not about the ego of developers. Be a nice guy and do a good job, and you'll get lots of thank yous, a couple of friends, a couple of patches, some free beer or tshirts in return. Does this corrupt as well, getting a free coke? Yes, I got a free Jolt coke four years ago at Systems. Does this make you demotivated, that you didn't get one, too?

Zum Thema "Linux ist schwer zu bedienen":

Haben sie neulich mal bei Aldi eine Pfandflasche in einen der neuen Automaten gesteckt? Dann irgendwann diesen Knopf gedrückt und den Bon entnommen? Dann sind sie jetzt ein erfolgreicher Linux-Nutzer. (Wenn sie neulich mit Google gesucht haben übrigens auch, und wenn sie per DSL online sind mit einer relativ hohen Wahrscheinlichkeit auch.)

Anzumerken wäre noch, dass die Aldi-Pfandautomaten unter Debian GNU/Linux laufen. Debian dient auch als Basis des LiMux-Systems (Umstellung der Arbeitsplätze an der Stadt München auf Linux).

Angeblich arbeitet auch das komplette Kassensystem von Lidl unter Linux, ebenso wie die verbreiteten Fritz!Box DSL-Modems. Linux ist überall, und aus unserem Alltag keineswegs wegzudenken. Linux ist nicht nur auf den PCs von einer Handvoll Freaks und auf ein paar Servern, es ist praktisch überall dort, wo nicht der Ottonormalnutzer sein Solitaire starten können will. (Und auch dort kommt es eben langsam an, z.B. bald auf den 14.000 Arbeitsplatzrechnern der Stadt München)

Bleibt eigentlich nur zu sagen: Linux ist zuverlässig und einfach zu bedienen. Wenn die verwendete Oberfläche (z.B. www.google.com) für diese Nutzergruppe ausgelegt ist.

Den Fehler den viele bei ihrer subjektiven Bewertung machen, ist von den Oberflächen, wie sie "Linux-Freaks" bevorzugen (!) auf die Eignung des Gesamtsystems zu schließen. Viele der "Freaks" bevorzugen einfach den "vi" Editor, aber das heisst ja noch lange nicht, dass es nur diesen Editor gäbe! Es kann sehr einfach auf konkrete Bedürfnisse zugeschnitten werden, wie eben einen Pfandautomaten.

Tag clouds are usually done by scaling font sizes according to some weight.

Actually this is not very precise. For a representative representation (lol, I should get this domain name. representative-representation.com), the tag size - that is the surface area! - should be a representation of the tags weight.

The suface however doesn't directly depend on the font size, but is more like font size * length of word (length being appropriate for the font used).

So when displaying tags with very different font sizes, "egg" and "Technorati" shouldn't just be scaled by their weight, but also by their word length.

OTOH, few users will actually be able to "grasp" the actual difference in size. IMHO it's just about "popular" vs. "obscure" and about making the tool more intersting to use.

I've been working a little bit more on the folding tagcloud for Debian packages. I've added closing of folds, and the code for displaying selected tags as well as matching packages is in place, too (you'll need to use a different .json data to actually see results though).

To make it truly interactive, i.e. allow the selection of multiple tags until you get some results, I need to add more data files.

So I'll have to decide now if I'm going to use a CGI (the "traditional" method), which will likely need to have some caching, or if I'll just precalculate everything into static .json files. I could even store them as .gz on the webserver; any browser with ajax capabilities should be able to do gzip decompression on the fly. This would offer maximum performance and security, but it means I'll need more magic in the javascript (and Javascript is ugly). Or I'll do a combination of both, use a tiny CGI serving the precalculated data; the CGI could then easily be replaced with a dynamic-caching CGI later.

SVG rendering for the tag cloud would probably be also very cool. With some smart layouting algorithms, it could become much more cloud-like. And there could probably be a nice animation when "subclouds" are unfolded, pusing away the other folds. However, that would be much slower. Any animation means a slowdown, since it adds extra delays.