On 02/03/2010 11:46 AM, Jesse Keating wrote: > On Wed, 2010-02-03 at 11:23 -0500, Przemek Klosowski wrote: >> I don't understand why 'Electronic Design Lab' is a separate spin: if I >> install all the EDA-related packages that it contains, would I not get >> an equivalent capability? >> >> The only reason I can think of is the media capacity limitation, which >> forces dropping some packages to make space for someone's desired set >> which is not already part of the mainstream collection. > > There is also the issue of multiple providers of a given functionality. > When all are present, an algorithm tries to pick the "best" provider, > which may not make sense to a human, but every human is different. By > breaking up the large package set into a smaller subset, one can short > circuit that "best" selection by only having one provider for that given > functionality. What do you mean by 'functionality'? Is it what's provided by an RPM package? This would suggest that packages in spins would be functionally different---which is a little uncomfortable to me, because how can I ever know that I have the best version of every tool? To make sure I would have to try all the tools from all the spins, in principle. > > FEL exists for the reason you stated above, but also as a marketing > tool, as it is very easy to install from a Live image, you had somebody > a disk and say "install this, you'll have an electronics lab". Much > easier than handing them a stack of DVDs and saying "Start this install, > select this package here, this group there, remove this package here, > format accordingly, and hopefully you got all the right selections > done". I have a generic Fedora install with an 'Electronics' tab in the 'Applications' menu. I got it after I selected it from the Engineering section in the yumex GUI, I believe. This is preferable to me, as compared to installing a separate spin. I can see a psychological difference here. I am used to having one computer on which I do everything, from watching youtube videos to designing PCBs, rather than several computers for specialized tasks. Maybe the kids today see it differently :). -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
