Hello Andy,
But if the plan is to create this Core / Extras
discontiguity anyway, and now RH seriously considers to move KDE into the
ghetto, then this is "shrinking the core distribution".
The fact that Red Hat has *not* yet proposed such a move has stopped me
from starting to shout very loudly about this issue. The only RH
employee who has supported such a move afaict is Warren, but that was
his personal opinion.
I am also not a great proponent of a substantial reduction of Core. Like
Jos I think a distro should be somewhat complete wrt the packages
offered. Of course removing stale packages is a good idea. But I am
afraid the redundancy in Core is not of such extend that Core can be
reduced substantially.
I find the suggestion to remove KDE from Core ridiculous, as it affects
a significant part of the user base. A rather arrogant proposal from a
few Gnome centered people. Maybe I should suggest to keep KDE in Core
and move Gnome to Extras in return. Note that I am rather neutral on
which of those desktops is the best. I've been using Gnome the last
couple of months, but before I used KDE on a regular basis. I think
there is place for both in Core, as well as for one or two of the
lightweight desktop environments/window managers.
Basically, my suggestion is that "core" should be the
minimum userspace stuff
around the kernel that is needed in almost all scenarios. Everything else is
in Extras, or you can make another repo layer Fedora GDesktop which is
Core+Xorg+Gnome.
As you might understand I disagree. The current size of Core is fine
with me. People with concerns about downloading too much stuff when
using the ISOs should investigate a bit on dependencies and download
just the packages they need for and install from HD or via NFS. Or do an
FTP installation using your local mirror.
Leonard.
--
mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research