Re: [MiNT] Sparemint Site

[Mark Duckworth <mduckworth@atari-source.com>]

On Sun, 2004-09-12 at 13:37, Konrad Kokoszkiewicz wrote:
> > http://dev.sparemint.org/documentation.php?showdoc=7
> 
> Good job. But I think that words like:
> 
> "MiNT has always been a bit disorganized in that there was the debian 
> MiNT idea, and now the sparemint idea. It was a royal bitch to get 
> everything installed and setup properly and everything... well.. sucked."
> 
> are a bit too sharp and not very true either. Before the (never actually 
> finished) Debian and Sparemint, there was KGMD, Knarf German MiNT 
> Distribution, which actually was quite similar (functionally, that is) 
> to something what EasyMiNT is now, and additionally worked very well for 
> many starters, including myself. KGMD contained everything a MiNT setup 
> of that time might want to contain, including usual /bin tools, two gcc 
> compilers, X server, X applications, manual pages, ftp/http/smtp/telnet 
> ... clients and servers, and so on, everything logically distributed 
> among the filesystem.
> 
> So it definitely cannot be said that with KGMD "it was a royal bitch to 
> get everything installed and setup properly, and everything sucked". 
> KGMD was put together in - IIRC - 1995 and worked quite good for a lot 
> of people. Well, it wasn't easily upgradable, since it didn't contain a 
> package manager. That's the difference. Nevertheless I think that the 
> words cited above are a bit unfair to people who worked on MiNT and MiNT 
> distributions before SpareMiNT has appeared.

Draco,

I fixed it up a little bit, and removed some of that language.  I think
part of what I was trying to do was allay some fears who attempted to
use MiNT before and never really got things working.  I think it was my
way of saying "Look, I know it was tough before, but it's not now at
all", and I think admitting that things weren't too easy is the first
step in convincing people.  I certainly wasn't trying to trvialize the
work that other people did and in fact I even forgot about KGMD, mostly
because I only used it once on an ST, and indeed it was pretty
effective.  And of course the final fact is that without the work people
did then, we wouldn't be where we are today.

Mark