On Wed, 2009-12-02 at 08:38 +0100, Arvid Picciani wrote: > Ray Kohler wrote: > > > What I personally am in support of, in the general case, is > > "suckless.org-style" minimalism, rather than following upstream's > > direction. > > So if upstream changes the default to enable the hal and > > dbus bits, I will then be in favor of Arch disabling them, and we'll > > be in disagreement then. (That said, if that actually does happen, I > > won't asking the Arch devs to implement my wishes, since they'd > > clearly be in violation of the Arch way.) > > Indeed. As brought up by others, forcing minimalism is as much violation > as forcing bloat. > However, arch has been built around the idea that users are capable of > customizing packages to non-upstream settings. > I urge you to do exactly that. Fair enough > > I have posted and will continue to post various bugs to the tracker to > restore upstream defaults in favor for minimalism. If these reverts get > rejected in favor for bloat, the clear bias is a disregard of the very > core ideas of arch, and I will eventually fork arch entirely, given > enough support. Implying a bias if things do not go the way you want is just a bit of a stretch, don't you think? What's the percentage which would tip you off? 50%? 40%? In the end, the devs make a decision and (if they're nice) explain it, and that should be that. All this 'fork this fork that' threatening is really quite sad. I know its common in open source and linux in particular, but I certainly don't see threatening a fork and dilution of resources as in an way beneficial to Arch as a distro and to us individually as users. > > Either way, i'd welcome if you contribute, in order to get the user > experience you (and others including me) desire. That is, either > contribute packages to aur, to fix insane upstream defaults, or > contribute to an eventual fork to restore upstream defaults. > Will you? :) I see dbus/hal and the rest of this bloat as part of a good user experience. This is a difference in opinion, not a heresy. Having said all that, contributing the appropriate packages to the AUR is a very good initiative. Expand the choice of the user, I know some, maybe many, agree with you on minimalism w.r.t dbus/hal/the like. Forking is ridiculous and non-practical, and it would be better for everyone involved in Arch if its not used as a proverbial hammer to get one's way.