[Freedombox-discuss] Policy questions

[Sandy Harris]

On Sun, May 8, 2011 at 5:00 PM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:

> Sure, users are free to whatever with their FreedomBoxes - it is Free
> Software.
>
> But the FreedomBox is a *subset* of Debian with additional constraints
> especially on user-friendliness.  I do not consider "aptitude install
> whatever your heart desire" as especially user-friendly.
>
> I envision that we decide on some pieces in Debian, work with the
> maintainers of those pieces to make them possible to not only be
> installed in the "aptitude install, tinker with configfiles until happy"
> fashion that we are used to, but also supports hooking up with a
> dead-simple design which we invent - or (hopefully) discover that others
> have invented and convince someome to package and maintain in Debian.
>
> So I expect the "dead-simple" interface of FreedomBox to only be able to
> add/remove - or enable/disable if there are so few that it makes sense
> to inlude them all as part of the "core" - those services which are sane
> for the device - which means both user-friendly and considered secure.

An excellent analysis, and the same sort of vision I have.

I would add that there may be a few pieces not already in Debian,
or not yet in the stable branch, that we turn out to need. That
means somewhat more work.

Also, the design we come up with must deal with policies and
config files as much as possible. Asking a user to type a
command to install something is not all that unreasonable.
Asking him or her to edit most config files is.