On Jul 23, 2004, David Nielsen <dnielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > As everyone probably knows a few days ago a suggestion was brought up > that we start moving none essential stuff like KDE, XFce and a lot of > the other duplication into Extras in order to reduce the size of Core. Personally, I think this Core/Extras thing is a mistake. Pushing packages to Extras won't make them any less of a maintenance burden, and the inability to download a set of CDs and do a full install at the time Core is released renders them bandwidth-expensive (no bittorrent for them) or unusable (need for broadband). I'd rather go for Core/Components. Core would be close enough to a minimal install; maybe with the addition of X for rhgb, firstboot and system-config-packages. Everything else would be component CDs, that the installer would be able to read from and install along with the Core, and that the user could choose whether to download and have available for installation. So we'd have a component for Gnome, a component for KDE, for OOo, for development tools, for server packages, etc. Components would be files containing a filesystem image, a tarball, whatever, containing the packages, plus package meta-information. One could download such components and burn them to CDs however they like. The installer would be able to look for such packages in any of the existing install methods, and offer to install packages in them. The nice thing with this arrangement is that components would have names that people could easily choose whether to download, and they could burn them into CDs however they like. The downside is that the installer gets more complex, and it may have to go through all available media twice; once before the package selections, once for the actual installation. -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
