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.
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".