Hi > > I don't know. The more I think about it, the less > excited I get. Perhaps > someone can share a more rosy picture of how moving > packages to Fedora > Extras is supposed to make the users' lives so much > easier. Anyone care > to bite? > I do. Fedora core should only include one default program for each kind of task overall. there might be a few exceptions like including say nano as well as vim but having 5 different browsers and calling in fedora "core" doesnt make any sense at all Fedora extras and alternatives should have all the other stuff but can be integrated with anaconda if thats going to ease the split up. fedora core being limited to one or two cds has the following advantages * security - people tend to install whatever comes with their distro. users tend to do this because they might not know whats optional. providing the defaults would help having less stuff installed on their machines which is potentialy more secure * updates - fedora provides updates not only for bug fixes and security updates but also for adding new features. basically whenever a new upstream release is being made for stuff included in fedora, the project strives to release that as an update. this tends to add up to gigabytes over a particular release and lifecycle. by reducing the amount of packages, end users will have less stuff to update. this also helps them manage their systems more easily * downloads - fedora core attracts a good amount of users completely new to Linux. they will have be happy to use what is provided within core without having to make a choice between N number of stuff that seems to be providing the same thing. having fedora core limited to a single cd or two is beneficial because users will potentially have less stuff to download * retail redistribution - magazines and books will find it more easy to redistribute a single cd rather than a whole bunch of them. some choose to modify the distribution for this purpose. we will ease their pain and expand the reach of fedora * community access - by giving important packages over to the community, fedora project would demonstrate its commitment to allowing everyone to contribute to it. as a more specific example, KDE tends to have less integration and changes in fedora which many people believe is the result of redhat's focus on gnome. by allowing the community to maintain the KDE packages in extras, fedora core developers can go ahead with what it wants to do with gnome and the rest of the community can take care of KDE well. those who oppose the move because they believe this will become a political fight should note that fedora extras can be integrated very well with anaconda and a subset of fedora extras which includes KDE can be supplied and follow the same release cycle as fedora core itself making the transition easy to follow. fedora extras shouldnt be treated as something less important to fedora core. the fedora project should make sure they have the same kind of quality and support as fedora core itself. policies should be formed so that the core developers takes care of important packages moved to extras till the community steps up or alteast give a buffer period. the project should have a publicly documented clear policy of what core, alternatives and other repos should contain and how the community can involve themselves in the maintainance of packages ===== Regards Rahul Sundaram __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more. http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
