rawhide report: 20040128 changes

[Tim Daly]

>Office/word-processor apps and other similar desktop apps are key
>applications which play an essential role in people's decisions to
>choose a distribution. Therefore, IMHO, having the freedom of choice on
>them is vital.

Hmmm, a rational approach might be to work out a classification system
for functions within the system. The kernel will allow you to choose
a particular filesystem format to satisfy the "filesystem" function
(e.g. ext3, reiserfs, jfs, etc).

Is it possible for us to think about generic classes of "functions
needed" (e.g. mail transport, X managers, and that religiously-
neutral class, editors)? That way we could push a lot of these
"core" packages into the "extras" class without defaulting to
any of them. That would allow a "profile" file to dictate 
defaults. Since anyone could create a profile file there could
be several different profiles (e.g. windows-ish (lindows?), 
suse-ish, etc).

Packages could contain the category (-ies) they supply.
Perhaps we could look at freshmeat, sourceforge, and
fsf to create the first cut of categories.

This is (slightly) more rational than arguing over which editor
will or will not be in "core" as opposed to "extras". There won't
be an editor, by default. There will be the editor chosen by your
profile. This causes "core" to be much smaller with a focus on
libraries, filesystem layouts, and a minimum toolset for 
building packages from scratch. The categories would help
structure pile of packages on the rest of the distribution.

If this appears reasonable I'd be willing to scan the various
package sites and work out a first-cut on categories.

Tim Daly
daly at rio.sci.ccny.cuny.edu