Re: Debtags for defining the minimal age that a program can generally be used

Hello,

Here are my comments about this interesting discussion. For sure Debian
Jr needs kind of classification to allow parents install what is best
fit for their children. I agree about the 4 stages of children
development, although we do not provide such rigid classification with
DoudouLinux. Usually we consider 3 stages because we don't target young
teens:

* beginners, learning the computer (“babies”)
* children not reading, usually below 6-7 years
* children reading, then 6-7 to 10-12 or more, we dont care about the
upper limit to say the truth

With other DoudouLinux contributors we had a discussion 2 years ago
about showing target ages in DoudouLinux or not, in order to let parents
allow or disallow activities. One of our contributors who is graduated
in psychology told that there are too much variations between children
to decide for them all what they can do and cannot. Moreover some
parents tend to be too much conforming to the classification (“it's for
6 and up, you're only 5.9”), leading to a frustration or even loss of
motivation for the computer (which we don't want). So I believe we
should rather use “soft” classification, eg. small/middle/big child then
teen, or even S, M, L, XL.

The second point is the actual age target of apps. I don't think apps
are developed with a precise age range in mind but rather a goal for
helping children grow, for developing skills. Nevertheless using skills
is probably too complicated for a classification while skills may not be
all acquired at the same age for every child. So again, a classification
probably has to be soft enough (and accept the same app in several
classes, eg. Gcompris as said).

Finally, just take the place of the parents one minute: you're
installing Debian for your kids, what would you like to see in the
installer that would ease the customization for them? I bet a list of
tasks that allow to quickly:

1. have an idea of the age for which it is supposed to be fit
2. know the kind of apps it is (education, entertainment, music,
drawing, etc.)

So I agree with the 2 axes classification and think this should be
achieved using in main tasks and meta-packages, rather than Debtags in
my opinion. But this may not be sufficient. For example one of our
concerns is to be able to propose packages sets for low-end machines and
for high-end machines, especially because of ARM computers. I don't know
if Debian Jr should deal with this because too much choices may sound
confusing. For this reason I feel the Debian installer should only show
the main choices, ie. small/middle/big child, teen. If parents don't
want games, they'll have to go deeper in the Jr packages lists. If they
want 3D games, the same.

Concerning the selection of packages, I'd like you to know that I've
already looked at the current set of Jr. packages, with the intention of
merging the DoudouLinux package sets [1] into them. Unfortunately both
sets are using different classifications while the selected packages are
quite different too… In the end I understood that some preparation work
is required before making use of our work in Debian Jr. This is the work
you've just started!

[1]
http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/doudoulinux/live/trunk/config-base/chroot_local-packageslists/

-- 
Cheers,
JM.

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