On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 05:43:14PM -0400, John Thacker wrote: > And when nothing in Core requires it, what's wrong with moving it to > Extras? Because it's no longer easily/immediately available. And nowadays it doesn't much matter if things are or aren't possible, but rather if they are easily or not accessible. More often then not, if someting is not working right out of the gate, it's not available for all intents and purposes. Look, this guy I worked with once came up with this idea of an "Engine". It was a rather mystical thing, but any problem that we came up was somehow magically solved by the "Engine". Any diagram had an arrow in and out of the "Engine". "Extras" starts to sound just like the "Engine". Moving stuff to "Extra" solves very little other than save a bit of space, and mostly caters to our obsesive-compulsive sense of neatness. But it _doesn't_ buy functionality. It just buys a bit of space. And space is cheap. Very cheap. On the other hand, it creates a lot of work for both users and developers. And their time (and mindshare) are very, very expensive. This is why it's a poor trade. We have to have the courage to say what is part of the platform. And once we commit to something, we have to live up to the expectations. People *need* that to be able to build for Linux. It's essential. There's no reason why we shouldn't do it. We do that for kernel. We do it for glibc. And a bunch of others. But we need to do it for more libs, we can't have in 2005 a platform made up of only some basic libraries. We said GNOME is that platform -- we better live up to our promise. -- Dimi.
