Essential Packages

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

On Mon, 2004-01-05 at 20:50, Casey Price wrote:
> In reality, most os' don't ship
> with any AV, thats the reason the AV companies make their money.

Arguably, its because OS vendors don't want to be in the AV business.
Designing intelligent virus detection routines is a non-trivial task
that never really ends. An AV suite is only as good as the viruses it
detects, and keeping virus definition files current is vital. These
reasons are why the major players in the AV space have almost exactly
remained the same for the last 10 years (maybe longer?).

I think counting installation CDs is pointless. Media is cheap, disk is
cheap, bandwidth is cheap, and they're only getting cheaper. We
shouldn't use that as an excuse to bloat the distribution, but its not
the right approach to come at it.

I think the Core should be a framework, containing the basic tools and
technologies to cover the majority of general purpose uses. I think the
Core is more than Base (bash, kernel, glibc, etc), but not much more
than is needed for the user to use yum or up2date to customize it to
their liking. Users want package availability with the click of a mouse,
which is why Debian and Gentoo are so popular. We can spend the next 12
years trying to get consensus about where to draw the line, but I would
rather just draw it and get down to building packages to populate Fedora
Extras, so that someone can type "up2date clamav" and pull it out of a
repository immediately after install. 

Today its AV, tomorrow it will be foo, the day after that bar... lets
just take what we've got, intelligently trim it down, and call it Core.
Everything else is Extras.

~spot
---
Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat*com> LCA, RHCE 
Red Hat Sales Engineer || Aurora SPARC Linux Project Leader

"The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is
novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present
social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to
be published." -- Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World"