> Further, it is (IMO) believed that the people who will suffer from
> the change are the ones best able to cope [...]  On the other hand,
> all those people who never want to look at an rc file, ever, and
> couldn't really handle it if they were required to, are the ones that
> benefit most from the change

Yup.  Support as many people as possible.  Numbers are good, minorities
can go hang.

I see NetBSD as turning into - or trying to turn into - yet another OS
catering to the point-and-drool crowd.  *Just* yet another such, even.
That is incompatible with satisfying me or the niche I see myself as
belonging to.

> I know that you don't think that NetBSD ought to pander to the
> incompetant, but it isn't really a choice that anyone gets to make -

Sure it is.  There's no reason core couldn't decide that anyone who
*needed* (as opposed to wanted) sysinst was not part of their target
"market", same as they now don't consider people who want to run
MSWindows programs part of their target market and thus don't fault
their OS for not satisfying them.

> more and more people are at least trying NetBSD, the simpler it is
> for them, the less work it is for the people who maintain the system
> - as they don't have to spend as much time helping people cope with
> the simplest things, and can spend more time doing more interesting
> development.

Underlying this is the assumption that NetBSD has to support (either
with software or with handholding) everyone who tries to use it,
regardless of who those "everyone" are.  I don't think that's as
necessarily true as you seem to be assuming it is.  I see nothing
conceptually wrong with responding to someone who can't grasp the
notion of a disk partition about the way we currently would to someone
who complaints that Microsoft Word won't run: "you aren't part of our
target market; you're better served by some other OS".  (What is inside
and what is outside the "target market" envelope is something that few
if any of the free OSes even try to state, so it's not surprising that
it could shift, here, without anyone catching it happening - indeed,
most people probably aren't even aware of the shift.)

If indeed it's a shift; that may have been core's direction from day
one.  It's not what I perceived when I first got involved with NetBSD.

					der Mouse

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