Michael Schwendt wrote:
On Tue, 5 Apr 2005 16:14:41 -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
Here are some reasons that if I were a package, I might not want to be
in extras:
1. Much smaller audience (lots of people do install everything in
core, but not so with extras today)
Moot point, as laziness is the primary reason why Joe User chooses an
everything-install in the fear that manual selection of packages would be
to complicated or time consuming.
With no group select feature and not having all potential packages
available to select/deselect during the install, it is better for me to
do an everything install. You should be able to select every package
available during install and there should be a seperate group that
relates to the labnguage packages.
After doing an everything install, I ran rpm -e to rmove all of the
additional language packages that were installed using an everything
install and the languages was the reason that I avoided doing an
everything install in the past.
Now with so many packages not available and also so many seperated
packages, especially the java packages, an everything install is more
attractive than a server, workstation, desktop or custom install.
It is not lazyness as much as the installer being pretty darned scaled
down regarding functionality in these later days.
Despite the availability of tools like
Yum, it's still considered too inconvenient to add missing pieces after
installation (and system-config-packages is a dead end with regard to
adding software to an up-to-date FC). And do those people only install
everything, or do they also use everything? Where is the benefit of users
who install everything but use only a fraction of the packages? For most
of the Extras users it makes no sense to install every package from
Extras.
Yum for development usage is pretty much a tool that needs a lot of
special steps to get it to be useful. I came up with a script tht I use
after it fails to install programs because of it not doing its best,
then feeding you a list of unresolved programs. I have not tried the yum
shell feature yet, since I get that you cannot run commands like yum
shell do-your-best in the shell and commands like list unresolved
packages or similar useful features.
2. More difficult distribution model (if someone burns me the DVD ISO
redhat provides it has all of core, but none of extras)
Being that extras has so many worthy packages, it would be great if
these packages could be available during install, as an additional
CD/DVD or included on the Core DVD version
Does the same "someone" also burn complete Fedora Core Updates onto a
separate DVD?
Because of the possibility of needing to install a fresh system and then
needing to downloading an enormous amount of additional rpms, I have
saved the downloaded packages from such an instance for usage on future
clean installed systems. Providing an ISO which included the updates
might not be a bad venture.
Extras has a lot of programs that I use and trust to use. I don't see
any deflection in quality, but more creative and fun to use programs
than core.
I'll stop here.
Jim
--
Q: What's the difference between Windows 95 and a highly destructive virus?
A: About 90 MB of hard disk space.